The Way the Future Blogs

L. Ron Hubbard, left, and John W. Campbell

As the 1940s mutated into the ’50s things changed.

All through World War II, and for some time after, Astounding had been king of the hill — eagerly read not just in America but also in England, where a young Arthur Clarke was getting around to mailing in his first story, “Rescue Party,” and in Germany, where in wartime days, Wernher von Braun had been able to get his treasured subscription copies only by means of a false name and a neutral mail drop in Sweden.

Around 1950, though, competitors began to appear — first The Magazine of Fantasy, a more literary take on the field, then Galaxy, a more relevant one, along with lesser titles from others. One might have thought that competition could awaken John’s competitive spirit. It didn’t seem to. He had gone through a period of looking for new editorial challenges before America got into the war, with such ventures as the fantasy magazine Unknown, then an attempt to remake Street & Smith’s hoary old aviation magazine, Air Trails, into a science-news magazine called Air Trails and Science Frontiers, neither of which survived very long.

Then for a time, he seemed adequately fulfilled by concentrating on his services to the war effort. (When the Stars and Stripes ran a piece on new rocket weapons one of the authorities they quoted was described as “John W. Campbell, Jr., physicist and war work consultant.” I sent the clip to John for his amusement, but he may not have been amused. He didn’t reply.)

But when the war was over and he was merely the editor of one really great science-fiction magazine again, he seemed to enter a new phase. That was as a believer in some weird and improbable kinds of — I don’t know what else to call it — magic.

 
A disclaimer. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t the only one to whom John talked non-stop about all the wonderful and clever things that had been accomplished by “us” — which I took to mean the presiding triumvirate who ran Dianetics/Scientology. That, as John described it to me, consisted of three more or less equal-ranked persons: L. Ron Hubbard, the almost forgotten skin doctor Joseph Winter, and John himself.

I believe that each of the three was considered by the other two to deserve the ranking because of services rendered; in Ron’s case inventing the subject matter; in John’s the fact that it could hardly ever have got off the ground without the mighty boost John gave it with his magazine.

And Joe Winter?. I don’t know the answer to that for sure. I didn’t know Winter well, only met him a few times, never talked with him or about him with either of the other two at any length. But he did have a legitimate M.D. and did wage a rather persistent, if quixotic (and markedly unsuccessful), campaign with the medical establishment to grant Dianetics and/or Scientology some respectful kind of recognition. So I think, with no more evidence than I’ve shown you, that what Winter represented to the other two was a touch of legitimacy.

And, yes, I wish I did know some other people who had heard as much of John’s proud progress reports whom I could ask what they thought of it all. But I don’t.

I’m pretty sure that John’s audience for that sort of conversation would have included just about everybody he saw. But I don’t know who all the others were, and rather few of them can be still alive.

 
Related posts:

• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Clayton Magazines
• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Street & Smith
• Astounding: The Campbell Years, Riding High

Some of you may remember that some time ago I warned you (twice, actually) that I couldn’t take on a correspondence or even answer letters because my right hand was basically paralyzed and that was the one I wrote with. Well, it’s still paralyzed. But I have learned some useful ways of getting around that, to some extent, so I’m going to try to respond to a few communications now.

As you know I’m a beginner at this blog racket. I don’t know whether it’s etiquette to use people’s actual names, so I’m going to play it safe this time and disguise them.

First a thank you to one I will call DB. I recently published a short essay on the impetus given to the growth of science-fiction fandom, but said I knew I had published it somewhere already but couldn’t remember where,

DB could. He wrote, “I can tell you where you published this. It’s the opening of the second chapter of The Way the Future Was.”

Well, so it was. That’s a little embarrassing — I didn’t think I was really losing my marbles quite that fast — but anyway thanks!

And happens I have some news about that. I’ve just signed contracts with Baen Books for the reissue of some chunks of my earlier writing in the electronic book format, including The Way the Future Was. Don’t yet know when they’ll be available, but when I do, you’ll see it here.

And since others commented that they enjoyed reading this sort of ancient history now and then we’ll go ahead and publish the rest of the chapter, shortly.

I was tickled by the comments on my story about finally being granted a high-school diploma, seventy-odd years after becoming a dropout. A bunch of old buddies got off their duffs long enough to write things like: “Mazel tov. Now you can make something of yourself,” and, “A person of your intelligence should go on to higher education. By choosing the right major you can expect a good job when you graduate.” Etc.

How disrespectful these people are of their elders. But I love them anyway.

There were almost as many comments on my two postings about L. Ron Hubbard, A couple of them were quite unhappy with me, for example a woman who wrote: “I have been a subscriber.. Now I will unsubscribe.”

I’m truly sorry about that. I’m not trying to make anyone unhappy, so perhaps I should try to spell out what I do try to do.

When I talked about the Scientologists I mentioned that I knew there were reports of terrible things they are said to have done. I didn’t repeat any of the stories because I had no personal knowledge of how accurate they were, and they didn’t need to be reported as some kind of a public service since they were already widely published.

As we get on in the histories of John Campbell and his involvement with Scientology, etc., there will be some reports I will make about events concerning them. I won’t, however, print any unless I myself know them to be true or, alternatively, I have been told about them by people I trust who were on the scene. And if the latter, I will always tell you who my informants were.

Looking at this from the other side: When I wrote about the Writers (and Artists) of the Future contests, I’m sure the heads of that enterprise would have preferred that I be a little less candid about a few parts of it. But I was urging beginning writers to take advantage of it, and I couldn’t fail to mention what I thought were its (relatively few) drawbacks. So candor won.

Candor will generally win in whatever I write. I won’t publish scandal just for scandalousness’ sake, but I’ll try to tell the simple facts except when (rarely) they might cause more pain than benefit. That won’t be a big problem. Most of the sf people I know, which is way the largest fraction of recent generations of them, are basically quite decent folk.

L. Ron Hubbard

All right. Now I’ve spent pages and pages talking about L. Ron Hubbard and Ron himself hasn’t yet appeared in person on the page even once. What’s going on here?

One thing that has gone on is that every time I show up at some Woffie event, they make sure that an interviewer shows up very soon, along with a cameraman and a recordist so they can get a few sound bites from me. They always have a lot of questions, and they all cluster around one particular subject. Since I am one of the few people still around who ever met him in the pre-Scientology days, they want to know what L. Ron Hubbard was really like.

Unfortunately, there’s a disconnect in logic there. I do know quite a lot about what Ron did and what sort of person he was, but the reason for that isn’t because he and I spent a lot of time palling around together. We didn’t. Oh, we did meet, all right, and we did have other contacts that did not happen to involve breathing the air of the same room at any time. For one, I was occasionally his editor — or, more accurately, one of his editors — first around 1940, when I was 20 years old and editing two sf magazines for the old Popular Publications — and then half a century later when I was executive editor for Ace Books, and we had a bunch of Ron’s titles on our backlist. (I might also mention that he dedicated his novel, Battlefield Earth, to me. However, that doesn’t prove much. He dedicated it to quite a few other people as well.)

But when those interviewers turn on their cameras I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of personal detail to give them.

I definitely met Ron in the flesh. With the help of my Woffie interviewers, I’ve repeatedly searched my memory for such occasions, and have come up with two periods when I know we happened to be geographically close. One was in the late 1960s when, briefly, I was executive editor at the rapidly failing publishing company called Ace Books. As such, I was particularly interested in Ron because I was pretty sure that if we rescued a few of Ron’s most successful old fantasy and sf novels from Ace’s backlist to new editions we could start making a little money from them, which at that time Ace really needed to do. Reissuing the books should have been no problem, but for various reasons connected with the disarray Ace had got itself into, I needed to talk to Ron first.

Fortunately, a convenient opportunity was coming up. At that time my two older daughters were majoring in copper-bashing and thinking good thoughts at a Rudolph Steiner School in England. I was in the habit of driving down to see them every time I was in London, and I knew that to get there I went right past Hubbard’s Scientology headquarters at Saint Hill.

But what with one thing and another that meeting didn’t happen. I think it came close. I believe Ron and I had some correspondence about a meeting, but things were getting sort of weird around Ace at the time. I would remember it pretty clearly if it had, and I don’t.

That leaves the 1940s in New York.

There was at the time a weekly custom of science-fiction writers and and editors getting together for lunch in a private dining room in one of the hotels just off Times Square in New York. I think it was on Thursdays, and I know Ron attended now and then, as I did. It’s likely we chatted from time to time, but, if so, I have to say that I don’t remember what about.

This leaves only one occasion that is really clear in my mind. That was a dinner party at the apartment of a retired naval officer — and science fiction writer — named Malcolm Jameson.

What I remember most about that party was Jamie’s daughter Vida. She was good looking and a writer and friendly. She was also successful at selling her stories to the Saturday Evening Post, which I had never come close to. So I was glad to have the opportunity to visit the Jameson home and chat her up.

Astonishing Stories, Oct. 1940

Jameson himself was an infrequent writer, but I had published some of his work. That included a two-part serial of his called Quicksands of Youthwardness, which might be viewed as a sort of antecedent to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Anyway, I don’t remember who all was at the party, but I got there early. Jamie provided me with something to drink, and Vida with someone to talk to. Things were going swimmingly until the door opened and another guest arrived.

That was L. Ron Hubbard.

There is one thing about Ron that I do remember. He was a chick magnet. He was pretty good at getting an audience of any gender to pay attention to him, but on this occasion the conversational partner he was attracting was Vida Jameson, and he attracted her clear away from me.

And that’s pretty nearly all I remember of that meeting with Ron. I have a notion that if it had not been for Vida, I might not still remember that meeting at all.

 
Nevertheless I did, a moment ago, say that I knew a lot about Hubbard’s life and times from other sources, and what other sources were they?

There were a lot, but one of them stands out, and that is the then editor of Astounding/Analog, John W. Campbell, Jr. So, to carry on the story, we will switch to a new format. What we’ll call it is “Campbell and Hubbard,” and it will be starting in the blog soon.

 
Related posts:
The Worlds of L. Ron Hubbard
Weekends with the Moonies

When people ask me why I became a judge for the “Writers of the Future” contest, I tell them that it was AJ Budrys’s fault. Until AJ worked his will on me, I was making it a point to stay as far as I could from Dianetics and Scientology and all the other weird things that my hero and mentor John Campbell had chosen to believe in. (Hieronymus Machine, Dean Drive, et many a c.)

It wasn’t simply that I didn’t believe in Scientology as a religion. I didn’t, but then I don’t believe in your religion, either, whatever it happens to be, because I don’t “believe” in anything that has to be taken on faith. People who take faith-based actions have caused many, probably most, of the world’s messiest disasters, from our present economic catastrophe to most, maybe all, wars.

Algis Budrys

So when AJ phoned me one morning to invite me to become a judge in the new “Writers of the Future” contest sponsored in L. Ron Hubbard’s name by the Scientologists, I didn’t let him tell me how nicely they would treat me and what a wonderful deal it would be for struggling writers. I just said no and declined to discuss it.

That’s where it stood for a few months, until AJ got back on the phone. He reminded me that when I turned him down, he had recruited Theodore Sturgeon to take my place as a judge, and then sorrowfully let me know that it wasn’t working out. Ted’s health had begun to fail. He was now hospitalized, at death’s door and with no hope of recovery — or of managing to read the dozen manuscripts that were sitting by his hospital bed, written by the first group of contestants, who had already been waiting far longer than was fair. So would I please, just this once —?

How could I refuse? I couldn’t. I didn’t. I told AJ to ship me the damn manuscripts. When they arrived I put everything else aside to read them — I was working as Bantam’s science-fiction editor in those years, plus writing my own books, and so without a lot of spare time on my hands. Then I read parts of the stories again. Then I emailed my votes to Author Services, which is the action wing of “Writers of the Future,” and then I went back to my life, feeling pleased with myself for having given a friend a helping hand in an hour of need. And then — Well, then things changed.

When people ask me how I wound up as an almost 30-year veteran as a Woffie judge I usually give them the short version: “I signed on to do them a favor, and then I just forgot to quit.” But it is a little more complicated than that.

My basic feelings hadn’t changed, pro and con. Let me give you the major arguments, as the debate had gone on in my head: To begin with, there are some pretty unpleasant things that have been said about pernicious practices of Scientology, and I believe that at least some of them are true. On the other hand, they’re not the only religion that has done lousy things, and at least I’ve never heard it said that Scientologists have murdered anyone. (That’s more than I can say for most of the major religions I know of.)

Looking at the other side of the argument, the pro-Scientology one, religions over the years in general seem to have given comfort to many people. That arguably is not necessarily a good thing, because the comfort of religion has frequently been employed to make people, usually poor people, accept manifestly unfair treatment without resistance, on the grounds that accepting evil in this life will buy them an eternity in heaven. (That’s what Karl Marx was talking about when he said that religion was the opium of the people.) On the other hand; most lives are marked with serious sorrows of one kind or another, and it does appear that religion can make these burdens perhaps a little easier to bear.

I have to say that I deem that to be a powerful argument, maybe the only meaningful one, for putting up with the problems religious beliefs cause. There is not so much comfort to be found in this world that I want to take any of it away from anyone who has found some.

And, anyway, the specific matter we were discussing — the “Writers of the Future” contest — is by and large a good thing for writers, who need all the help in getting started that they can get. And the Woffies have been kind to me, kind enough to spare me most of the Hubbard idolatry that does creep into some of their activities as well as kind in many creature-comfort ways. So I have stayed.

 
Oh, not without occasional qualms.

I said that the contest is a good thing for writers, which it is, but even good things may have some flaws. There’s more of the idolatry in the annual awards ceremony than there used to be. Ron’s name is everywhere, the giant photos of him stare down from the stage and, perhaps most of all, there is the way almost every winner prefaces his remarks with thanks to Ron for making the whole thing possible. All of that is the unarguable right of the organizers, of course, since they pay the piper, but it strikes me as annoyingly heavy-handed.

Nevertheless, when unpublished writers ask for advice about how to get their careers moving I always advise them to enter their stories in the WotF contest. It’s easy enough to do. You go to a bookstore and ask them for a copy of L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future. Each copy contains an entry blank, with the contest’s address, and a copy of the rules and rewards. (Or you can get them off the web, but it’s a good idea to read some of the winning stories.) Type out a nice clean copy of your best story and send it in to that address. Three months later, do the same with your second best story. Three months after that, your third best, and you keep on doing that every three months until you run out of stories. (Which actually you should never do. You’re still writing, aren’t you?)

The reason for doing it that way is that the contest is organized on a quarterly basis. Every three months, the staff gathers up all the stories that have accumulated in that period, makes copies for each quarterly judge and ships them out. When the judges have finished their deliberations, the winner gets $1,000, with lesser amounts for second and third place. Then, when the fourth quarter has been dealt with, the four quarterly winners go to a different set of judges, who pick the grand winner, who gets another $4,000, to make the total an even Five Large. (An amount which seemed a lot more impressive twenty-odd years ago than it does now, but, hey, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth having.)

The thing to remember is that each quarterly batch is separate. One batch may be twice as good as the next. Or, through the luck of the draw, may just have more or fewer good stories. Or — a bad deal for you, as I know because it has happened to me in other awards — there can chance to be two or more stories in the same batch, each of which is really good and would be an easy winner, if only the other or others had been in different batches. That would be tough luck. But it’s a problem you can’t prevent, so that’s why you try to be in as many quarterly batches as possible.

Okay, suppose you do win, what then?

Then Author Services flies you to wherever the awards are to be given out that year, usually around Hollywood. (But now and then at a more interesting venue. Some past ceremonies have been at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, at the Houston Space Center and at the United Nations in New York.) There they will put you up in a nice hotel and provide you with three decent squares while you’re there. And there will be at least two events going on. The big one is the actual awards ceremony where, unless you are lucky enough to be female, you will be asked to wear a tux. There you will get up on the stage to accept your award and say thank you, and then you socialize with a bunch of other winners, some other writers and a collection of more or less celebrities at a subsequent buffet. (Nice food, by the way.)

Continue reading ‘The Worlds of L. Ron Hubbard’ »

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.