The Way the Future Blogs

Newt Gingrich

Way back when — specifically in 1996 — the world was different in several ways. I was writing a regular column for Andy Porter’s great old newsmagazine SF Chronicle and my great but definitely never old wife, Betty Anne Hull , had allowed herself to be nominated to represent our 8th Illinois district of Congress by the Democratic Party. Unfortunately both enterprises came to naught. When the votes were in, Betty Anne had lost the election to the long-entrenched Republican incumbent, and the person who legally owned Andy’s magazine (never mind how that happened. Long story) had pulled the plug. An article I had written for its next issue on Newt Gingrich thus never appeared.

In more recent times, it occurred once more to me (having forgotten all about that earlier piece) to write about Newt, so I did. But then Andy, somewhat sharply, asked if I had forgotten about the first piece. Which, of course, I had, my memory having once been described as the envy of all the other sieves. So he sent me a copy of the piece and when I read it ,it seemed interesting enough to share with you. But do, please, remember that it is a 1996 piece and all the things that I speak of in it as current matters are very much not any more.

(Incidentally. Andy has retained copies of all my SF Chronicle pieces and thinks it would be a good idea for one of you editor guys to bring them out as a book, maybe an ebook. I agree with him.)

 
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• Newton and Me
• Newt the Mewtant

King of the Comics and Agent, Editor, Faaan

Julius Scwartz, 1945.

The thing about Julius Schwartz is that, while I myself did many things in that Early Paleozoic Era when there were no jet aircraft or nuclear submarines and people didn’t even have TV sets yet, Julie Schwartz was doing the same things even earlier than I did.

For instance, I joined my first science-fiction fan club, the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, in 1932, but Julie had joined the first science-fiction fan club that ever existed, the New York Scienceers, years before that. I edited my first fanzine (we didn’t call them that yet, just “fan magazine”) when I was twelve. So did Julie. But he was twelve before I was, due to his unfair advantage of having been born four or five years earlier.

And both of us had set ourselves up as literary agents, specializing in trying to sell other writers’ stories to the science-fiction magazines, and both of us coasted from that to actual full-time jobs editing —

Hey, wait! I was going to say that we then coasted into full-time jobs as professional magazine editors. And that did happen for both of us, but I’m getting the facts wrong, because that was the one time that I led the way for Julie.

I broke in in 1939, when I lucked into the job of editing two science-fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, for Harry Steeger’s giant pulp house of Popular Publications. Julie not only was still making his rounds as a literary agent at that time, I actually bought a number of stories from him for my magazines. He didn’t get the chance to make the jump to an editorial job, with an actual salary, until 1944. Then he was hired as an editor by a company that published comics magazines which ultimately mutated into the mighty DC Comics.

Oh, and there was another significant difference in our careers. By 1944, I wasn’t working for Popular Publications anymore, anyway. A war had come along and it required me to get into uniform so I could give it my full attention. I never did go back to working for Popular Publications, either.

Julie, on the other hand, knew a good thing when he had it. He stayed with DC Comics, in all of its convolutions and growth problems, until the day when — by then as its editor in chief! — he retired.

That was in 1986. However, you mustn’t think that his retirement from editorial duties took Julie off the payroll. Although he didn’t have to worry about deadlines or sales figures any more, but now he was reborn as DC Comics’ “goodwill ambassador to the world of comics and science-fiction fandom.” That meant he was given a fat expense account and charged with showing the DC Comics flag at as many cons and other events as he could find the strength to go to.

Was that what you would call a dream job? For a grown-up faaan who still loved cons and fandom in general, you bet it was! But it wasn’t unwarranted. More than any other single human being, Julie was responsible for returning DC Comics, and indeed the whole comics industry, to the money-making powerhouse status it achieved in the mid-1950s. in what was called “the Silver Age Revolution.”

Continue reading ‘Julie Schwartz’ »

Zhou Qi, Betty Anne and me.

Back in Chengdu, after Yang Xiao had finished writing up that story about World SF for her magazine, her next major production was to give birth to a son. She did that very well, too.

Now Zhou Qi — or Michael, as his language-handicapped friends are allowed to call him — is twenty years old and lives in Australia,. There he pursues an advanced degree part of the time and teaches mathematics the rest of it. And a few weeks ago, on a visit to the States, he stopped by our house to visit us, and we snapped this picture.

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.

Robert Silverberg, me and Betty Anne at ConJose in 2002. (Photo by Laurie D.T. Mann.)

Robert Silverberg has been a good friend for a pile of years, but “good friend” doesn’t quite describe some of the more disconcerting parts of our friendship.

Along about the early 1960s, while I was just getting comfortable as the new editor of Galaxy and its companions, Bob Silverberg was sending me almost a story a month according to our agreement, and Earth was fair beneath our feet. Agberg, as he had taken to calling himself (Ag being the scientific abbreviation for “silver,” and if you don’t already know why that is, there’s no particular reason for me to burden you with it) seemed happy with our contract, as I knew I was, and it never seemed particularly spooky to me until I got another of those letters.

“Dear Fred,” it said, “have you noticed how your life and mine are playing a fugue across the calendar?”

They were, too. I bought a big house in Red Bank, New Jersey; Bob bought a bigger one in Riverdale, New York. My then wife, Carol, and I suffered one of the worst blows any couple has to live through when our first-born son died in infancy. Not long after Bob and Barbara Silverberg lost a newborn baby of their own.

Our home in Red Bank caught fire when a neglected electric blanket malfunctioned, and missed total destruction only because the local volunteer fire department happened to be holding its monthly membership meeting just then in their firehouse a couple of blocks away. And then the Silverberg house in Riverdale caught itself on fire and barely missed its own total destruction.

So Bob wrote me, “It’s obvious that every disaster in your lives is going to be copied by a facsimile in ours. So, Fred, here’s the thing. Will you be good enough to give us a little warning before the next catastrophe so we can get a head start in preparing for ours?”

 
As it happened, Carol and I weren’t intending — or experiencing — any significant life-style changes around then. Not true for Bob and Barbara, though. No sooner did they see the repair work completed on their house — and there was nothing “sooner” about it: you have no idea how drearily long it takes to put a partly burnt-out house back into the immaculate shape it had when you bought it; you couldn’t imagine how long unless you were unlucky enough to live through a rebuilding of your own. Anyway, no sooner did they get it done than they put the house on the market, found a buyer, and immediately changed their whole lifestyle. No more New York grandee. Now they were California sun worshippers, putting down new roots up in the hilly countryside across the Bay from San Francisco.

You understand that I’m not criticizing them, exactly. Indeed, I sometimes wonder why I didn’t pack up and move to California myself — or to Florida, or Hawaii, or maybe Tahiti. I mean, I’m a writer. I don’t have to go to an office. I can live anywhere, and I truly, bitterly, unforgivingly HATE cold weather. (Heat doesn’t bother me at all. I attribute this to having spent the first year of my life in the Panama Canal Zone, where heat is all you ever get, so you get used to it. But whatever the reason, come every Thanksgiving I begin berating myself for not moving to where you spend the holidays at 80 degrees instead of 8.)

I did, however, wonder what Bob and Bobby had traded in that fine Riverdale mansion in for. (Riverdale, remember. That’s actually a part of the Bronx, but you must never remind any Riverdalean that that is true. They may cry.)

I can’t say I really envied the Silverbobs their semi-palace. Any more rooms than the thirteen I already owned would have simply been showing off, and I had a full acre of land, with a pretty little river flowing along two sides of it, compared to their approximately two and a half square feet of grounds, bounded by city streets all over. But, ah, that library! Their house had been owned before them by a couple of New York celebrities, and although I’ve forgotten their names, they must have been great readers. The house’s library room was nearly the square footage of my living room and dining room combined, and it was two stories high! With bookshelves going floor to ceiling on every wall! And those roll-away stepladders everywhere, too, so if you wanted to read selections from half a dozen volumes you were probably going to be getting in your day’s exercise at the same time, too!

So you understand that I wanted to see what the Silverbobs had traded in that sort of high-tech bibliotechnology wonders for. That was easy enough to arrange. Next time I was on the West Coast on my publisher’s expense-account dollar I gave Bob a call. “Sure. Come on up and see us,” he said. “Don’t come in the main entrance, though. We’ll be in the pool. Go left about a hundred feet and there’s another entrance. We’ll let you in there.”

So I did as directed, and Bob did as promised, and there they were, Bobby and Bob and their very nice pool, about the same size as my own, but surrounded by much nicer plantings and in a much nicer climate and, when you came down to it, missing only one thing. Clothing, that was. The Silverbobs weren’t bothering with bathing suits that year. Didn’t need them, either. The two of them had those diet-watched, exercise-unskipped bodies that I — well, that I didn’t.

They invited me to join them for a dip, but I declined. It wasn’t modesty that made me say no. It was mostly that I just wanted to get back on the bars and the rowing machines for a while first.

 
A while later my wife Carol and I agreed to disagree and she left the big old house on Front Street for diggings of her own. When I mentioned this to Bob in a letter he replied, “Huh. You starting up that fugue thing again? Bobby moved into her own place a week ago.”

It’s all right, though. I promised Bob I wouldn’t do anything like dying, going bankrupt or contracting a loathsome disease with first warning him, And so far I haven’t.

 
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Robert Silverberg

The Demolished Man was worth all of Horace Gold’s editorial aggravations. The Demolished Man was fresh, adventurous and beautifully written, and it began a stretch of five years or so during which Alfred Bester was turning out what was arguably some of the best writing in the sf field, right up to his second great novel, The Stars My Destination, sometimes called Tiger! Tiger! in 1956.

But, as far as great sf novels were concerned, that was it. Alfie did produce a group of first-rate short stories and novelettes around that time — “Fondly Fahrenheit,” “5,279,009″ and my own personal favorite, “Disappearing Act,” for example — and he did write more novels later on, but I don’t think anyone has ever argued that they came up to the standards of those first two terrific books. Maybe Alfie really needed Horace’s nagging to make them great.

And, actually, science fiction lost a lot of its interest for Alfie Bester.

Alfie hadn’t stopped being a money writer. He had returned to science fiction because the money had got better — magazine word rates had tripled after World War II, and now the stories were being picked up by book publishers for even more money. And Alfie had just gotten some significant Hollywood money (for a film which, of course, was never made), which gave him and Rolly the chance to live in Europe for a while.

This suggested to him that he try a little nonfiction travel writing for a magazine named Holiday, which he discovered was just as painless to write as anything else, provided you were Alfred Bester. That paid pretty well. In fact, the magazine’s editors liked his writing so much that they offered him an editorial job, at quite a decent salary, and Alfie suddenly had a new home.

That is, for eight or nine years he did, up until the time when the magazine, as magazines do, went bust.

And then, after he and Rolly had been happily married for forty-eight years, Rolly died. And he began to lose his vision. And things, which had been going quite well for Alfie Bester, were beginning to be less idyllic.

Continue reading ‘Alfie, Part 2: When Bester was the Best’ »