The Way the Future Blogs

 
As I mentioned in the short piece I wrote about Alfie Bester, he and I had a joint talk for a bunch of English fans thirty-odd years or so ago. To my total amazement, some of them recently came up with a tape of that discussion. They transcribed it, and I thought some of you might like to read it here in the blog.

Here’s what Peter Roberts’ fanzine, Checkpoint, reported at the time:

TYNESIDE “FUTUREWORLDS”: (Ritchie Smith reports on the Newcastle sf film festival) “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl spoke at the Tyneside Cinema for some two hours on June 26th. Bester was smallish, plump, larger-than-life, and explosively friendly in a Hollywood sort of way, right down to calling some people ‘darling’. Pohl looked more literary: ectomorphic, tall, and restrained, full of good anecdotes, like Bester (sadly, too many of them were familiar from Pohl’s essay in Hell’s Cartographers). Afterwards they signed books — Bester’s dedications were especially witty — and the great men and a large minority of North-East fandom went off for a Chinese meal.”

   Frederik Pohl       Alfred Bester

Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation

Recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, by Kevin Williams. Transcript by Sue Williams, edited by Neil Jones and Kevin Williams. Originally published in Rob Jackson’s fanzine Inca 5, December 2009. Additional editing here by Leah A. Zeldes.
 

Pohl: Let me tell you about Alfie Bester. I’ve known him for a long time, and I first encountered him when I was 19 years old and editing a magazine called Astonishing Stories, and I bought a couple of stories of Alfie’s because I liked them. And then, some years later, Cyril Kornbluth and I had written a book called The Space Merchants, which I sort of hoped might win a prize, but it was beaten out by something called The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester.

A little while later, Cyril and I were working on another novel — I think it was Search the Sky. We’d written a couple of others by then, and I’d just begun to edit a thing called Star Science Fiction Stories — a series of anthologies of original science fiction stories. I brought home a story by Alfie Bester that I had just accepted for Star. It was called “Disappearing Act,” and I showed it to Cyril while we were working on our own book.

He gave me a resentful look and said, “You bring me this to read when we are writing that!”

[The novel we were writing was pretty much space opera, while Alfie's story was a literate gem. But I didn't explain this in the conversation, which led to a mixup. —FP]

Bester: Cyril didn’t like it?

Pohl: He loved it. He thought it was so much superior to what we were doing that it embarrassed him.

It’s been going on like that — our paths keep crossing, and he keeps doing this superlative work, and now I’ll let him speak for himself.

Bester: The one thing that you must understand is that we admire each other profoundly. I cannot tell you how many times I have read a story or novel of Fred’s and said, “Why in Christ’s name couldn’t I have written that?” — and then run into Fred and I tell him. The truth of the matter is that there is no rivalry between us at all, there is nothing but admiration.

We are rather like the high baroque musicians: We borrow from each other, we learn from each other, we admire each other, we do the same things, or different things, and have a hell of a ball.

Now Fred’s novel which he wrote with Cyril Kornbluth, The Space Merchants, is, I think, the finest novel ever written in the history of science fiction. It is a brilliant piece of work. Many brilliant things have followed it, but this came along when everybody was obsessed with Doc Smith space opera, which has its own charm — it’s great fun — and suddenly comes this realistic extrapolation of what American life, American advertising, American ecology and American psychosis will lead to eventually.

Horace Gold ran it as a three parter in Galaxy. Gravy Planet, he called it. A tremendous piece of work — exciting, ravishing. I will never forget the scene where that crazy broad with the needle is giving him the works. Fred, that was outrageously brilliant.

Pohl: That scene was all Cyril’s but I’ll accept the credit.

Alfie is one of the greatest writers science fiction has ever had and he is well aware of it — he just wants to be told! Everybody knows the novels, but there was a period in the early ’50s when in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction month after month there was a leading novelette by Alfred Bester.

Bester: Always with the wrong title!

Pohl: Always with the wrong title but always good! They were just brilliant, one after another.

Bester: I once sent two stories to Mick McComas and Tony Boucher (at F&SF) — they had asked for them, of course — and they switched the titles on the stories. I stink on titles, I really do, I’m terrible.

But the point I’m going to make very strongly is the greatness of science fiction. To my mind, it is the last, the last outpost of freedom of literature in the States — I can’t speak for England. In science fiction, we can do what no one else can do in any other medium.

I speak as a magazine writer, novelist and scriptwriter. The constraints of commercial fiction in the States in television, in films, in radio, you name it, are so severe that there is very little you can do. This is one of the reasons why I have written science fiction off and on all of my life. Quite simply because if I come up with an idea which rather enchants me, I would very much like to develop it and do it, so that people would see it and hear it.

If my producer, my director, the client says “No, no, it’s too expensive, no it’s too far out, people won’t understand it, ah forget it, give us something a little less,” then I have to turn to science fiction. In science fiction, you can do anything you please, and God knows the artist needs a free hand. The greatness of science fiction is not the science, not the prediction of the future, not anything you want to name — the greatness is that it is wide open, and we can do exactly as we damn please, and that story will run somewhere, somehow, and you will have your audience, and you will get feedback. And after all, a writer without an audience is no writer at all; you’ve got to have people that you are entertaining.

Continue reading ‘Me and Alfie’ »

    William L. Gresham

By the third or fourth year of the Ipsy, the great house in Highlands had pupped a fair-sized litter of clones. There was me and my family in Red Bank, the del Reys a quarter of a mile away, George and Dona Smith in Rumson and, at least briefly, the Kornbluths in Long Branch and the Budryses in Oceanport … and, perhaps most important, the Laurence Mannings in Highlands itself, next door to the Ipsy-Wipsy itself.

When Laurence Manning — Fletcher’s long ago collaborator from the days when science-fiction magazines had the square footage of telephone books (no, not in the number of pages, of course!) — and his family came out for a weekend, they loved the location as well as the company. And when Laurence mentioned that he was looking for a house to buy and move to, Fletcher was quick to say that when he and Inga had bought the Ipsy, they’d bought more acres of land than they had any use for, and the Pratts would be happy to hive off a few acres to sell to the Mannings if they’d care to build a house next door. Which they did, and so the Pratts and the Mannings were next-door neighbors.

Actually that seemed like quite a nice arrangement. Although Manning didn’t have much interest in science fiction anymore he still liked the company of writers, and the conviviality of an Ipsy-Wipsy weekend. And we liked the Mannings.

He knew everything about home plantings, which made him a useful resource for those of us who, like myself, had never had to plant a space much bigger than a windowbox before. He was good company and by no means limited to shop talk. So things went swimmingly, with the Mannings’ house guests walking the couple hundred feet of lawn to the great house next door on Saturday nights … until they didn’t.

Remember that I once said that, with all the social drinking that went on of an Ipsy weekend, I had only once seen anyone unpleasantly drunk?

This was the once. The man in question I did not know well, though I had read some of his work. His name was William Lindsay Gresham.

Continue reading ‘Fletcher Pratt, Part 5: Shadow Over the Ipsy’ »

   Eugenie Clark

It’s hard to list the Ipsy’s guests in any sensible order, perhaps because they were not an orderly bunch. It does make sense for me to divide the guests into two classes. To begin with, there was the New York science-fiction crowd, all of whom I had known for some time.

In that group were most of the science-fiction people I have already written more or less extensively about in these pages. Among the ones most frequently present were Lester and Evelyn del Rey, Bob and Essie Bolster, George and Dona Smith, Cyril Kornbluth (first as a house guest of mine, then as a nearby resident on his own). Assorted other house guests of mine included Fritz Leiber from Chicago and Jack and Blanche Williamson from New Mexico.

Ted Sturgeon was definitely a regular in an unusual sense. For a couple of months one summer he never went home at all, since at the time, his finances being anemic, he didn’t have a home to go to.

The Pratts had no objection to Ted’s staying in the house when everyone else was gone. However, they didn’t offer to feed him. That was not a problem for Ted, who enjoyed a good dish of eel. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that by the time he finally moved out of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, he had fished out the entire family of eels who lived by the boat dock. They never returned.

 
Any number of other New York-area sf people visited the Ipsy. Isaac Asimov, for instance, was there I think only once, but it was a significant visit, since Fletcher and Inga had plans for Isaac. They spent a lot of that weekend telling him what a wonderful place the Bread Loaf Writers’ Colony was for anyone with the desire, and the ability, to be a serious writer … and, I’m pretty sure, spent an equivalent period of time with the Breadloaf people telling them what a wonderful prospect Isaac was. The effort paid off. Isaac did give Bread Loaf a try; he loved the place, the Breadloaf people loved him and he became a Bread Loaf stalwart.

The other fraction of frequent guests at the Ipsy basically comprised the non-sf friends of the Pratts, many of them with ties to The Saturday Review of Literature. Some of those were actual celebrities of one kind or another, as for example Eugenie Clark, known worldwide as the “Lady with a Spear,” after her bestselling book with that name. Eugenie, as a child, had been fascinated by the works of William Beebe — Half Mile Down, the story of his adventures hanging at the end of almost 3,000 feet of steel cable in his “bathysphere,” a steel sphere about the size of a pup tent, or Beneath Tropic Seas, about his less spine-chilling but even more beautiful experiences walking through warm-water corals with only a mask for breathing.

I could understand her fascination. I had been turned on by the same books at about the same age. The difference between Eugenie Clark and me, though, was that she then grew up to become an actual ichthyologist, and I only to become a writer.

Continue reading ‘Fletcher Pratt, Part 4: The Friends of Fletcher’ »

After Cyril’s cremation, I hung around a day or two longer, because there were a couple more things I could do for the Kornbluths. Cyril had left a few unsalable and unfinished fragments, which Mary pulled out for me. I could see where he had given up on them, but I was a more resourceful plotter than Cyril had been. Besides, most of them had that wonderful total command of the medium that Cyril had begun to develop.

I told Mary that I could find ways of turning most of them into actual stories, and if she liked I would do so and sell them, and we would split the money. She said she liked, and so I took them home. (One of them, “The Meeting,” won a Hugo Award, the only Hugo Cyril ever got.)

But I had another, somewhat larger idea. “How,” I asked Mary, “would you like to start a new career as an anthologist?”

That one she liked a lot. It was something that she might perhaps be really good at, because she read a lot and seemed to have definite opinions — all you needed to become a successful anthologist, provided, that is, that you could find a publisher to buy your book.

But that was my job. I paid a call on that most decent of editors, Walter I Bradbury at Doubleday. “It should have a pretty good shot,” I told him. “All of the reviewers know her name, and every one of them liked her husband’s work. There should at least be some sympathy sale, and — ” But I stopped talking there, because Brad had actually been saying “yes” and “all right” as soon as he heard the name.

The book, Science Fiction Showcase, happened as planned. Mary made her choices, I helped her clear the rights. It came out in 1959. It sold some copies. And it disappeared into old-anthology heaven, because what it didn’t have enough personality to make readers want more. I should have worked on that with Mary. I didn’t, though.

There was one unexpected complication. I had been planning to ask the contributors to donate their stories for free, so she would get to keep more of the advance. Mary wouldn’t allow that, though: “No charity. I Will pay what every other anthologist pays.” And so it was.

She sent out checks to all the contributors or their agents. Since a big chunk of the stories she liked came from my agency, she sent the biggest check to me. I hope I had the decency to waive commissions when I gave the writers their share.

 
Most of the more dangerous brushfires that surrounded the Kornbluths now safely extinguished, I went back to my own home and my own work and the long haul.

(And, yes, the long haul is what comes next, after I write it.)

 
Related posts:

• Mary Kornbluth, Part 1, Part 2
• Cyril

The Battle of the Bulge left Dirk Wylie unable to hold a regular job, so we made him — and ultimately, me — into a literary agent.

After World War II had grabbed most of us Futurians by the scruff of the necks and flung us to various odd destinations in all sorts of unexpected parts of this planet of ours, it did, somehow get itself ended and there we were, civilians again, and back in New York. I had had a relatively undemanding war, ending up with doing public relations at the Mediterranean Theater of Operations in Caserta, Italy (with my spare time spent in a resort hotel on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius). Dirk Wylie, however, hadn’t had anywhere nearly as nice a war as I did.

Dirk’s war hit bottom in the early winter of 1944–45. That was when Hitler’s Wehrmacht made one last attempt to take back control of the western front in the Battle of the Bulge. It was a vicious and protracted fight, and Dirk, then an MP sergeant, was in the middle of it. This cost him. At one point, he jumped hastily out of a truck and landed in a very wrong way, doing something seriously bad to his spine.

That was the end of the war for Dirk, and the beginning of years of hospital stays and unremitting pain.

By the late 1940s, he was discharged from the New York-area Veterans Administration hospitals — not because he was cured but because there was nothing more they could do for him. Now Dirk was a civilian again, with one unanswerable question: What was he to do with the rest of his life? A normal nine-to-five job of any kind was pure fantasy. The only good part of the situation was that he didn’t need to make much money. The Veterans Administration had recognized their obligation to him and awarded him a substantial pension. But a living wage wasn’t the whole of Dirk’s needs. He was just barely out of his twenties, and didn’t like the prospect of doing nothing for the rest of his life.

I spent a lot of time with Dirk and his wife, Roz, discussing that question, and we came up with an idea that seemed worth pursuing. He could become a literary agent.

 
There are all kinds of literary agents. Some of them can do very good things for their clients, making sales for them that the writers would not have made by themselves and sometimes acting as story coaches to help their clients write more salable material. Others (as my mother used to say when totally exasperated) are not worth the powder to blow them to Hell.

So what made the difference between the saviors and the total wastes? One, a good agent needed to know the market. Two, s/he needed to know good work from bad. Three, s/he needed to be able to let clients know how to tell the difference between good and bad, too, and how to encourage them to get better.

Of course, Dirk didn’t have personal knowledge of all these things, although, as a Futurian, he had been exposed to a fair amount of shop talk over the years and had made a few sales himself. But what he did have was me.

Continue reading ‘How I Lost My Oldest Friend
(and Gained a Literary Agency)’ »

Cyril Kornbluth’s death came as a very bad thing that had suddenly happened to all of us, but it wasn’t really a surprise. Cyril’s doctors had told him, definitely and explicitly, that his heart had been worn out in the Bulge. It was barely able to continue to pump blood around its system.

It wouldn’t go on doing it, either, unless Cyril made some revolutionary changes in his lifestyle. Step One: no more cigarettes, coffee or alcohol — ever — for the rest of his life. Very, very limited amounts of spicy foods, and even more limited amounts of salt. Any deviation from any of this, ever, would have about the same effect as putting a gun to his temple and pulling the trigger. He would very quickly die.

Cyril took what the doctor told him seriously. He even tried to follow the doctor’s orders. When he came out for a brief stay with Carol and me, Carol baked him salt-free bread and cooked him fully dietary meals. Cyril ate them, without showing any signs of pleasure — I could see why, because I had tasted them for myself.

We didn’t do any writing, though. We didn’t even do any talking about writing. When I tried to get something going by showing him a section from my current work that I wasn’t feeling good about, Cyril took the pages from me and scanned them. Then he handed them back to me. “Needs salt,” he said.

And he went home, but, of course, Cyril just couldn’t live that way.

He stuck it out as long as he could, perhaps as long as a couple of months, and then he decided that he’d rather be dead than living like that. So back came the booze and the cigarettes and the salt shaker and all the other things that made Cyril’s life worth living and sure enough, next thing you know, his limbs were jerking and his eyes were rolled up in his head and he was busily dying on the train station platform.

 
All right. End of story for Cyril. The new major characters were Mary and the boys.

Cyril and I had had our ups and downs, but we had been through too much together for me to even consider walking away from their needs. I got dressed and jumped in the car and drove, as fast I could, through the hundred miles or so of rush-hour traffic between Red Bank and Levittown. Mary was waiting for me at the door, quite distraught — but, blessedly, sober.

First thing, we had to decide what on that list most urgently needed doing. There were a lot of contenders for the top need. She needed money for buying stuff, mostly food, for the kids and herself that day. They needed money, lots of it, to keep on providing for herself and the kids for the rest of their lives.

They needed to know what to do with Cyril’s corpse, which was, if I remember correctly, at that moment in the back of a station wagon borrowed from somebody in the Levittown Fire Department and parked at the curb in front of the house. They needed to know if there were documents to file, as there surely were, to properly record the fact that Cyril was now one with the ages.

That wasn’t the end of the urgent needs, but it was sort of at least the end of the easiest ones. We had some big, big breaks. What I had been dreading as the toughest of problems to deal with turned out to be the easiest. Mary wasn’t the first widow of a GI to fine herself in exactly that situation. She might’ve been about the one millionth. The government itself had set up the Veterans Administration to make sure that everything a veteran needed was available to give and, since negotiating with even a friendly government agency can curdle your blood, a horde of new veterans’ organizations produced a ton of smart, energetic, can-do volunteers to get the widows and orphans all the help they needed.

“What you’re entitled to, Mrs. Kornbluth, is so much for yourself and so much for each of your sons. It takes a little while to get started, though. Do you need money right now? Of course you do. There’s a special emergency lump-sum package we can get for you. I’ll start on that right away.”

They were, in short, wonderful. They almost made me cancel my intention to never join the beer-bellies of any veterans organization. But not quite.

The last disposition we had to deal with that day was Cyril himself. Happened my maternal grandfather, that bald and stone-deaf old man who had lived with us for part of the last years of his life, had been cremated near by. I checked some addresses and made a few calls.

And then Mary and I went to the front door of the crematorium, the station wagon with Cyril’s body tagging along behind. Somebody took the wagon and Cyril to the back entrance, while Mary and I were seated in a small auditorium, maybe fifteen or twenty seats, facing a drawn curtain. Music was playing. It didn’t take long. The drawn curtain rolled back. There was Cyril, looking very grave but otherwise about as he always looked, in a shirt, tie and jacket in one of those cardboard “coffins” they use for cremations.

They gave us a few minutes to look at him. Then Cyril and his casket began to roll away, into a pair of double doors that had rolled open behind him. I think we actually saw flames. I know we definitely felt heat. Then the double doors closed and the curtain came back down, and that was the last I ever saw of Cyril.

At some point Mary got a cardboard carton, not unlike the packaging that your milk comes in from the supermarket, that contained Cyril’s ashes. I don’t know what she did with them.

Part 3 coming up soon

 
Related posts:

• Mary Kornbluth, Part 1, Part 3
• Cyril