The Way the Future Blogs

   Judith Merril

For the first couple of years after World War II, I was living in Greenwich Village, as a civilian, along with my second wife, Dorothy Louise LesTina (about whom see The Way the Future Was.). We had a pretty busy life, the two of us, and although I had heard that there was a whole new science-fiction fandom in the city I was overfull of self-affairs (as the Bard put it) and myself did lose it.

Anyway, then Tina, visiting her parents in California filed for divorce. (There, too, check my writing about Tina for details.) In any case, I suddenly wasn’t married any more, and so I had time to get around to seeing if I and this new NYC fan community had any reason to get together.

It turned out that we did. I began making friends with young Robert Silverberg and young Charles Brown (yes, the Locus man, although all that was still very far away) and a bunch of other people who became close, long-time friends. And there was one really interesting thing, unprecedented in pre-war fannish history, and that was that quite a few of these new New York fans were female.

That was an unexpected but very, very welcome development. I soon became friendly with some of this new breed of femmefans, as they were (briefly) termed, and with one in particular. That one’s name was Judy Zissman. She was divorced and with an enchanting little girl whom she had named Merril. Judy wanted to be a writer and the two of us got along just fine.

Before I tell you some of the things that happened next, there is one thing you need to know about Judy right now, and that is the nature of her beliefs about sexual conduct. One of them was that females had as much right to sleep around as males do, and that that right was considerable..

That was one of the things I didn’t really want to discuss when I was writing The Way the Future Was. The good news is that now I don’t have to discuss it at all. In the last years of her life, Judy was writing her own memoir, and in it she was quite open about her views and her experiences.

Judy died before she could finish the memoir, but the two of us had begun having some of our children’s children growing up and taking over some things. One of them was our well-beloved granddaughter Emily Pohl-Weary, who, having herself become a writer, finished the book for her. (It was published as Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril. And listen, our kids and grandkids don’t fool around. It won a Hugo Award.)

So by all means, read all you like about Judy’s private business. Only read about it from her.

 
Before long, Judy and I had settled down to cohabitating in her gigantic New York apartment on East 4th Street.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. The place certainly was gigantic, at least four big bedrooms, but it was also on the basement level of the apartment building To get to it, you took the elevator down one flight. It had been designed, and built, with the expectation that it would be occupied by the building’s janitor and his family. In America’s postwar boom, though, your average janitor didn’t care to be treated like an inferior. The present incumbent and family lived in modest prosperity, rent-free, in a perfectly rentable apartment above-ground. Judy had discovered the situation and grabbed the underground space for a pitiful rent, which I think may have been less than $25 a month.

For us it was perfect. Plenty of room for us each to have space to live and write, and space for little Merril and for the child’s pet dog, Taxi Driver, and even for Judy to rent out one of the extra rooms to the occasional single woman who needed a cheap place to stay. One was Gerry Schuster, rehearsal pianist for the New York Ballet. Another, at a different time, described herself as “the white New York girlfriend” of a famous musician — and proved it by getting us all comped seats to his Carnegie Hall appearance, and a visit to his dressing room after.

And, in particular, the one thing that the place was perfect for was parties. We had a lot of them.

We were quite prosperous at that time, you see. I was book editor and advertising copywriter for the rich Popular Science Publishing Company at a steadily increasing salary. While Judy had got herself an editorial job with Bantam Books, working for Ian Ballantine, who at that time ran it.. Between us we earned quite a lot, we didn’t really spend all that much, and God was good. Not only that. Bantam gave Judy the chance to edit her first very own science-fiction anthology (but entitled Shot in the Dark to disguise the fact that it was sf as much as possible).

And even that wasn’t the very best of it. There was the fact that Judy had, without warning and all by herself, had unexpectedly written a story of her own that just knocked the socks off everyone who read it.

Continue reading ‘Judith Merril, Part 1: ‘That Only a Mother’’ »

Dear People:

As you know, I have a problem, and its name is Mark Rich. For some reason, and I have no clue as to what that reason is, it is quite obvious that he hates me.

Now, I don’t particularly care whether someone named Mark Rich hates me, since as far as I know, I’ve never met the man. The difficulty, however, is that he has written a book about it, and it comes at a bad time. I’m not young, and I’m not in particularly good health, and there are a number of things that are important to me that I want to get done. Dealing with the attacks of this man was not one of them

But I really can’t let him go on unchecked. It isn’t just that he hates me. He makes up whole scenarios that never happened to hate me for, like the one I wrote about last week in this blog. And honestly, Mr. Rich, that’s pathological.

 
So I am going to have to do some setting of the record straight.

This presents a big problem for me, one I thought I had faced and settled 25 years ago.

You see, when I first began writing the autobiographical sort of material that ultimately turned into the book The Way the Future Was, I had to decide just how much truth I wanted to tell. What I decided was that I would try to be as candid as possible about everything I had done, even the things I wished I hadn’t. The trouble with that was that I was not the only person involved in those matters. If I chose to Tell All about everything I did, it unfortunately would sometimes involve simultaneously Telling All about others, which I had no right or desire to do.

Understand that I am not saying that that sf community in New York in the 1950s and ’60s was riddled with vice and degeneracy. It wasn’t. Well, not a lot, anyway. But these were young people who did a fair amount of drinking and sometimes a modest amount of drugs. That is to say, in those respects they were quite like young adult bridge clubs, church groups and party-givers all over America. Only in their cases some of them got kind of famous.

There was, for all these reasons, a lot of stuff I didn’t write about concerning some of the other people involved because I didn’t want to embarrass them. In particular, that applied to my one-time wife, Judy Merril. We had just begun being good friends again as I was writing that book, and that was a good feeling. It gave us a chance to enjoy our increasing numbers of grandchildren together, and it let us remember, as Judy said to me once, “Why I liked you in the first place.”

Rich however seems to think that I persecuted Judy, and I will take that up.

He also all but states that I embezzled some of Cyril’s share of the earnings from The Space Merchants. I’ll deal with that one, too, and with several others of his very bad guesses. But I want to do something else first.

Rich apparently believes that, apart from dishonesty, my career in science fiction has been marked by general incompetence in just about everything I tried, as agent, as editor, as collaborator and as author. If I left anything out, he thinks I was lousy at that, too.

In the scheme of things entire, I would like not to care what somebody I never heard of thinks of me. This time, though, I don’ have that privilege, because Rich went and wrote this damn book. Lots of people do care about Cyril Kornbluth and are likely to want to read about him. (Even more, I think, may be likely to hear of our present differences and want to see what he said for themselves.) Some of them may know very little about me, or about what the rest of the world thinks of me, and how that contrasts with Rich’s opinions and flights of fantasy.

That would be a pity, so let’s look at the record.

Start with this: I have seven Hugo Awards.

That’s not a remarkable number, but I won three of them for writing (four if you count the new one I unexpectedly got this year) and three as editor, and I would like to point out that in all the years Hugo Awards have been given out, nobody else in the world has ever won the Hugo in both those major categories. (The editing awards were for If, and the fiction awards included those for my novel Gateway and a short story, “Fermi and Frost.”)

One Hugo Award I shared with Cyril, posthumously, for a short story, “The Meeting,” and that’s of interest here. When Cyril died, his widow, Mary, gave me some scraps and fragments of stories that he had left behind, apparently because he got that far and bogged down and couldn’t figure where to go with them. I agreed to try to make complete stories out of them, sell them for publication and split whatever they earned fifty-fifty.

One of those fragments was a scene set in a parents’ association for a school for handicapped children. Like almost everything else Cyril was writing in those days, it was beautifully done, but there was no story. I gave it a story. I believe Rich thinks I screwed that up, too, but I don’t have the patience to go back and reread his dizzy-minded remarks.

So I will just say that what actually happened is that it won a Hugo — the only Hugo, I am sorry to say, that Cyril’s writing ever earned.

Elizabeth Anne Hull, me, the Hugo and Steven Silver. (Photo by Cathy Pizarro.)

I didn’t get over to the Worldcon in Australia, so when I won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, my friend Bob Silverberg accepted it for me. Here is what he said at the ceremony:

“A couple of weeks before I left for Australia I received an e-mail from Fred Pohl asking whether I would accept the Best Fan Writer Hugo for him if he won. This is what I replied:

“‘Of all the goddamn crazy things. Here we are in 2010, you are 90 years old, I’m no kid myself, the worldcon is in Australia, and you are sending me some kind of newfangled electronic message about the possibility that you might win the Best Fan Writer Hugo. What would Sam Moskowitz say about all this? Don Wollheim? Hugo Himself? Are we both trapped in the future, swept off into this nonsense by some inexorable force? Of course I will accept that Hugo for you. It will be one of the great moments of my life.’

“And it gives me immense pleasure now to accept the Best Fan Writer Hugo for my friend of more than fifty years, Fred Pohl.”

After Silverbob accepted the Hugo Award, the trophy was ferried back to Chicago by Helen Montgomery, who passed it along to Steven Silver, who brought it over last week. Thanks to everyone concerned!

Thanks, also, to everyone for all the congratulatory messages, of which this one from Encyclopedia Britannica might be the most extraordinary. I wrote their entry on Tiberius in the 1960s!

My new Hugo. (Photo courtesy Helen Montgomery.)

To say that I’m pleased to have won this Hugo doesn’t really cover the subject, because I’m not just pleased, I’m tickled pink. So I want to thank everybody who voted in this year’s event, whoever they voted for; to thank as well all the nice people, beloved friends as well as total strangers, who sent me messages of congratulation and affection; and finally to thank the whole world of science-fiction fandom, which I have inhabited since before I quite reached my teens, and to which I will stop giving my allegiance when I stop breathing, but not before.

From the blog team:

Fred wins!

Robert Silverberg accepts the 2010 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award on behalf of Frederik Pohl at Aussiecon 4. (Photo by Laurie D.T. Mann.)

2010 Hugo Award Winners

Best Fan Artist
Brad W. Foster

Best Fanzine
StarShipSofa, edited by Tony C. Smith

Best Fan Writer
Frederik Pohl

Best Semiprozine
Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace and Cheryl Morgan

Best Professional Artist
Shaun Tan

Best Editor, Short Form
Ellen Datlow

Best Editor, Long Form
Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars,”
written by Russell T. Davies and Phil Ford, directed by Graeme Harper (BBC Wales)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
Moon, screenplay by Nathan Parker; story by Duncan Jones, directed by Duncan Jones (Liberty Films)

Best Graphic Story
Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm,
written by Kaja and Phil Foglio; art by Phil Foglio,
colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)

Best Related Book
This Is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”)
by Jack Vance (Subterranean Press)

Best Short Story
“Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s Jan. 2009)

Best Novelette
“The Island” by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2, Eos)

Best Novella
“Palimpsest” by Charles Stross (Wireless, Ace, Orbit)

Best Novel (tie)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
The City & The City by China Mieville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Seanan McGuire

Congratulations to all the winners!

“A kind of Wagon Train in space. . . .”

The Man Who Launched the Enterprise

      Majel Barrett and Gene Roddenberry.

I was pretty satisfied with Tricon, the Worldcon in Cleveland in 1966. When it was over, I had had a chance to hang with many old friends, I had had a few talks with writers I wanted to juice up for the magazines I was editing, Galaxy and If, and I had picked up another Hugo Award — this one a “Best Magazine” award for If. I was aware that there was a lot of stuff going on that I had missed — like the showing of the pilot episode of something called Star Trek — but I had received an information package about it from its producer, somebody named Gene Roddenberry, and he had described it as “a kind of Wagon Train in space.” That didn’t awaken in my soul any desire to see it.

True, Roddenberry himself sounded sort of interesting: A B-17 pilot with 89 missions in the South Pacific in World War II, later a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, who began writing TV scripts in his spare time. But by then I had had a fair number of dealings with TV people on my own, and they hadn’t impressed me with the breed. I wasn’t enough interested to offer to buy him a drink.

Then, in 1969, I won another Hugo for If and Star Trek won a Hugo of its own, and I got an idea. The most conspicuous thing about television was that their numbers were at least an order of magnitude larger than ours at the magazines. So why shouldn’t I try to get in on some of those large numbers, perhaps by obtaining the rights to publish an occasional story based on a Star Trek episode in one of my magazines? Would any of those numbers rub off on us?

I didn’t know that they would. On the other hand, I didn’t know that they wouldn’t. So I wrote Gene a letter, outlining what I had in mind and suggesting that he and I get together to talk it over. He responded at once with, “Sure, let’s.” And a week or two later, when I had been planning to be in L.A. for the purpose of urging some writers on anyway, I drove my rented convertible up to the gate at the Desilu lot, where Star Trek was filmed, and told the armed guard that I was here to see Mr. Roddenberry.

* * *

Gene turned out to be friendly, smart and obliging. He thought my plan could do nothing but good for both parties, and he thought it should be put into practice right away.

The only thing wrong with that plan, he told me, was that he didn’t have the authority to okay it. That belonged to the higher-ups in the company’s Byzantine Hollywood corporate structure. Star Trek didn’t own itself. It was owned by Paramount Pictures, which would have to approve the plan. Unfortunately, though, even Paramount’s approval didn’t mean I could start commissioning stories, because they, too, were owned, this time by the sprawling Gulf & Western, sometimes called Engulf & Destroy.

“So how long until we get a decision from Gulf and Western?” I asked, as politely as possible.

“Oh, you never know that,” Gene said. “Sometimes not too long. But anyway, as long as you’re here, I’ve got a photographer standing by. Mind if he takes a few pictures?”

I didn’t, and for a prop Gene picked his Hugo from the Worldcon off the shelf and we passed it back and forth for a dozen or so photographs — me awarding it to him for some, and then Gene awarding it to me (but with the lettering on the base carefully concealed) on the rest. And then I went on with the rest of my West Coast obligations.

Gene had invited me to try writing a script for the series. I did try, but without much luck. Perhaps the problem was that I didn’t really like the idea of another barrier between me and the audience — that is, a director and a bunch of actors — or perhaps I just wasn’t into network television, having already had my share of disillusioning experiences with it. Anyway, for some reason I just was no good at it. Still, that — and the hope that Engulf and Destroy might ultimately come up with the okay for us to do some of the stories — meant that I was in the habit of visiting Gene every time I hit L.A., which was always a pleasure. . . .

Well, almost always. There was the time when he invited me up to his home for lunch, high over Hollywood, where he lived with his wife, better known as Majel Barrett when she had appeared as Nurse Chapel in the series. It was a handsome house, with a grand view of the city spread out below. The furnishing was handsome, too, including the deep-pile, snow-white carpeting in the room we were in. Majel asked me whether I preferred white wine or red. I took the red. Then I almost immediately knocked the glass over, spilling the whole glass of that deep red wine onto the still deep-pile, but no longer snow-white, carpeting.

Majel was a sweet-tempered woman. The proof of that is that she didn’t snatch up one of the cheese knives and cut my throat on the spot.

I used to see Majel every once in a while at dinners of the local space society, where she was an honored guest. She spoke to me without rancor, which is proof, again, that she had totally forgiven me. (It is impossible that she simply forgot what I did to her beautiful white carpet.)

* * *

Star Trek had a good first year and a somewhat less good second year. For the third year it got canceled.

This sort of event is by no means unusual in the bloodthirsty world of network TV, but Gene wasn’t prepared to take it lying down. So he and some confederates concocted a plan to keep the show on the air for a while.

One of the confederates turned out to be me. To find out more about it, however, you’ll have to wait for the conclusion of this essay. That will be coming up in this blog before long, but not until I get around to writing it.

To be continued. . . .

 
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