The Way the Future Blogs

Algis Budrys
(Photo by William Shunn).
 

By the mid-1960s, Algis Budrys had become a darling of the critics. In the field of science fiction, two of the most respected at that time were Kingsley Amis and James Blish. Kingsley said that the way A J was going, he might become the most honored sf writer since H. G. Wells. Jim was less restrained. He thought that A J was becoming the finest writer in a second language since Joseph Conrad. One of A J’s stories had already been made into a film, though not a particularly good one, and his future was bright.

It was at that point that A J basically stopped writing science fiction and went off to Chicago to get into the public-relations business.

Why?

Well, I don’t know why. When A J took off for Chicago and a brief career as Mr. Pickle in a relish promoter’s PR campaign, it was a surprise to me. Perhaps it was because of the merciless difference between salary income and writer income that I alluded to earlier. By then the Budrys family census stood at six, with four healthy infant sons that needed to be fed every day — and would inevitably need more and more as the years advanced. But I lost touch with him for a year or two.

When I reconnected with him he had escaped from advertising and gone to work as the book editor for Playboy.

That made a certain amount of sense to me, particularly as he was showing signs of getting back to doing writing for me again. I was still editing for Bob Guinn, who had gradually enriched my expense account enough to permit annual trips to spur authors along . When in Chicago, I always spent some time with the Budryses. Their lives appeared to have slowed down and smoothed out.

But in that, too, I was quite wrong.

One day, back at home in New Jersey, I got a phone call from A J. He had news. The Church of Scientology had decided to honor their founder and principal sage, the science-fiction (and everything else, but best known for his science fiction) author L. Ron Hubbard, by establishing a new contest for talented entry-level sf writers that would pave the way for some of them to make the transition to professional success. Since none of the Scientology people knew much about publishing, they needed to find someone who did to save them from making too many blunders, and they had found A J.

“What I’m trying to do for them now,” he said, “is to try to find them major writers who —”

“No,” I said.

“— would be willing to be judges — what did you say?”

“I said, ‘no,’” I told him.

“But you didn’t let me tell you the good parts,” he said,

“That’s right,” I said. “I said, ‘no.’ ”

See how I handled it? A quick, firm decision, and then on to the next thing. No looking back, either.

Except that a few months later, when A J called again to tell me that Theodore Sturgeon, who A J had taken on as my replacement, was gravely ill, and A J was in a really tough spot, and if I could just help him out until he could find someone else. . . .

So I did it. I helped him out, and kept on doing it for the next thirty years.

 
In my defense, I will say that Writers of the Future, now broadened to include artists of the future, is indeed a good thing for beginning writers and artists, who can use all the help they can get. But there it is.

A J didn’t confine his efforts to Writers of the Future for the rest of his life. There was a prolonged, and expensive, period when he tried his luck as publisher of his own magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, but what happened at the end was simply that his health gave out. For the last several years of his life he was housebound in his home in Evanston, Illinois, where he complained that illness had so sapped his strength that he didn’t have energy for anything. Once he said, “There’s a novel I started in January and I’m not even a quarter through it.”

This was sometime in late spring. I said cheerfully, “So keep on plugging away. Sooner or later you’ll get it written.”

“Written?” he said, “I’m not talking about writing a novel. I’m talking about reading one.”

What was wrong with A J’s health was not a single, simple thing. I believe it was diabetes that kept him housebound for so long, but think it was metastasizing cancer that took him away in June of 2008.

He is missed.

 
Related posts:

• A J
• The Worlds of L. Ron Hubbard
• The Worlds of L. Ron Hubbard, Part 2
• Weekends with the Moonies
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me

    Frank Herbert, 1978.
 

As promised, we made Hawai’i our destination on our usual get-somewhere-out-of-the-cold trip one winter. Frank and Beverly Herbert had built themselves a house in the district of Hana, on the island of Maui, an area renowned for its beauty even in the state where there is very little that isn’t. Betty Anne and I had talked about taking a look at Hana before, but never as a serious plan, because Hana wasn’t easy to get to. You had to drive for a long time on a bad road through tropical near jungle to get there and that didn’t sound like much fun. But now a brand-new puddle-jumper airline that linked Hana to the capital of the island had just become available. It required no use of that unlovable road, and anyway, that’s where the Herberts were.

So we booked the flight and a hotel. Hana was indeed a particularly interesting area to see, home to a few movie stars and once a beloved retreat for, among others, Charles Lindbergh. When Lindy’s flying days were over, he spent the end of his life in Hana, and his family elected to bury him here. The area also has a waterfall nearly a hundred feet high and all sorts of beautiful growing things. Betty Anne saw most of them with Bev as a guide, while I mostly stayed near the hotel pool or my typewriter.

Of course, we were staying in the hotel, and not with the Herberts. We had known in advance that that wasn’t possible. Their multi-roomed house, though it had six baths, had only one bedroom, and that was their own. (They didn’t like the idea of houseguests.) At dinner, Frank conceded that they were beginning to believe that it might be nice to be able to put friends up now and then, after all, as long as they weren’t in the same house as the Herberts themselves. They were thinking that maybe, someday, they would put up a little guest house down the hill for that purpose

I don’t think that ever happened. Beverly’s health worsened and not long afterward she died. She and Frank had been married for nearly forty years.

 
In 1985, Betty Anne and I decided to take in the Worldcon in Australia, a continent I had never set foot on. We enjoyed it a lot, especially the sightseeing, although just as we were getting ready to leave our home, one of Ted Turner’s producers invited me to write a script for a new Turner project. It was an attractive prospect, but it meant I would have to write a treatment for the script while we traveled, and courier it back to America from somewhere along the way. But that seemed doable, and by the time we got to the con, we had had several really long flights. That sort of thing is good for my writing. I did some of my best work on airplanes, with my weird but lightweight and almost soundless Brother typewriter on my tray table.

At the con, we were happy to find that Frank had turned up there before us, in fact now equipped with a good-looking, brand-new wife to show off. Her name was Theresa, and they too had been exploring Australia as a sort of honeymoon. Frank was full of stories about the shooting of Dune, mostly in Mexico, and the two of them seemed about as happy as newlyweds are generally supposed to be. Well, with one exception. Somewhere along the trip, Frank said, he had picked up a touch of food poisoning, and he was going to have to watch his diet for a while.

That was a self-diagnosis and, sadly, it was wrong.

The next time I saw Frank was about a year later. I was at O’Hare Airport, waiting to board my flight to Seattle, where I was to take part in a brainstorming session about future small arms for the U.S. military when I heard my name called. It was Frank. He looked leaner and a bit tireder than when I’d last seen him, but his voice was strong.

That pain in the gut in Australia, he told me, hadn’t been food poisoning. It had been pancreatic cancer.

I knew what that meant. Nearly always, it meant dying quite soon. I must have looked as though that was what I was thinking, because Frank was shaking his head.

“I know that’s got a bad prognosis,” he said, “but the University of Wisconsin medical school has some new ideas about treatment, and that’s where I’ve been.”

The new ideas, he said, were pretty strenuous. Each period of therapy had to be followed by a stretch of recovery time at home. He had completed two therapy sessions and was on his way home to rest up for the third.

“Sounds like hard work,” I offered.

“It is,” he agreed, “but I’m going to beat this thing!”

I don’t know what else we talked about. Not much, I imagine, because they started boarding the flight. Our seats were not near each other. I thought of asking to change mine so I could have his company for a few more hours, but Frank already had one of his sons and one or two other men traveling with him … and, too, I didn’t want to risk tiring him out. When we reached Seattle, I looked around for him to say goodbye, but he was gone.

A few weeks later, I learned that he had died in Madison after undergoing cancer surgery.

 
Related post:
Frank Herbert, the Dune Man

I’ve been nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo
(and I couldn’t be more pleased!)

Of course being nominated for a Hugo isn’t quite the same as winning one. This is a lesson I have been taught several times. All the same, it’s a nice feeling, and I appreciate it.

The blog team was absolutely right, too, in urging you to join the Worldcon, give them the $50 and get the sampler of Hugo nominees. It comes in electronic form instead of good old ink on paper, which I personally much prefer, but the price is right. All those great novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories would be many times more expensive if you paid retail, and you get samplings of all the other awardable categories, too.

* * *

As long as we’re talking I’ve got a couple of other things I meant to talk to you about. One is a really neat book that’s coming out next month from Tor. Its title is Gateways — note the plural s — it’s edited by my favorite anthology editor ever (that is, the one I’ve been married to for the last quarter-century, Elizabeth Anne Hull) and it came about when Betty Anne told our Tor editor, Jim Frenkel, that she would like to put together a festschrift anthology for my then upcoming 90th birthday, composed of new stories written by writers on whose careers I had had some significant effect, as editor, agent, collaborator or whatever.

When she made a list, Jim whistled and said, “That’s a list of most of the top writers in the field.” Not all of the writers were able to produce stories for her but most did, and it is my opinion that some of these are going to be showing up on awards voting this time next year.

She didn’t make the deadline for my birthday, though. I kept getting sick, and her efforts would be devoted to keeping me alive for a while. And then Betty herself fell in a bank parking lot and cracked a lumbar vertebra, resulting in pain, surgery and a lot of lost time. But now it will be in the stores before you know it, and I think you’ll like it.

* * *

Speaking of the ills the flesh is heir to—

A couple weeks ago, I had to get an adjustment in one of the contrivances that keep me more or less normal. We had just parked at the hospital where they do most of my repair work when another car pulled up beside us, and out of it came our production staff, comprising Leah A. Zeldes, our blogmeister, and her husband, Dick Smith, who makes sure we have enough bandwidth and keeps our computers functioning much of the time. (They are, by the way, pretty good fanzine Hugo candidates themselves, having been nominated for the award in three separate years for their handsome zine STET.)

I was out of there and back home in a couple of hours. Leah, not so much. She had a couple of days of being observed while the doctors figured out what she needed, then a spot of surgery, then bed rest for recuperation, and then, just to keep the doctors on their toes, a bit of pneumonia to round things off.

Now she’s back home recovering. But she still managed to get up a couple of posts from her hospital bed.

Remember we were talking about PICC lines, the plastic tubes that they thread through a big vein to your heart for the purpose of getting medications well distributed in your body?

You need to scrub up pretty thoroughly when you’re getting one; and we’ve got some things to say about the scrubbing up. For one, there’s a mnemonic for the length of time time the scrubbing is to continue. That is as long as it takes you to sing “Happy Birthday to You” twice. You should know that actually it is the mechanical action of the scrubbing more than the soap that does the good in scrubbing up, and if you want to hear a scary fact about scrubbing up here it is:

Inadequate scrubbing causes about a quarter of a million serious infections in the U.S.A. every year, and 12 to 15 percent of those affected die.

Even scarier: there’s a 2.1-percent incidence of infection if the patient has been taken to a hospital, but only 0.1 percent if they’re being treated at home. So you may want to think twice before allowing yourself to be hospitalized for a minor ailment.

When I was ten years old, my mother used to have me skate down to the butchers’ on Flatbush Avenue and, for 39 cents, get half a pound of ground round steak and “watch him grind it.”

Then time passed. We got all the advantages of modern technology as they came along. By now, the butchers’ was in the local supermarket and the “ground round” was in pre-measured and plastic-wrapped packages, the healthiest-looking, reddest already ground meat you ever saw, and apart from the odd case of staph or Escherichia coli now and then, everything was just as modern and as sanitary as it could be, and of course it wasn’t 39 cents any more, either.

The other thing we knew, in a vague, generalized sort of way, was that it really wasn’t exactly round steak any more, either. That supermarket stuff is prepared in vast quantities in ground meat factories. Not all of it begins as any kind of steak; it is lips, or tripe, or stomachs, or hearts, or it is little bits and pieces of meat left over from preparing steaks and chops, and these little pieces are “bonded” together (we don’t say “glued”) with things called “meat emulsions” and “extracted myofibril proteins” to make bigger pieces which can be sliced and diced like what we know as “roasts.”

All of this, of course, sounds unpleasant, but when you buy a half-pound package of it, it fries up like any other hamburger and tastes just about the same.

However.

What you don’t know is how much of this beef (or this pork) is produced in the so-called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, with the addition of antibiotics as a regular part of their diet. This you really don’t want. It’s bad for your health. More significant (to me, anyway) is that it’s also bad for mine, because if you eat that sort of thing you help to evolve antibiotic-resistant microorganisms and other nuisances which wind up in other people’s bodies, including mine.

Bearing all this in mind, we decided we really wanted to know what we were eating, and so we elected to grind our own meat. We first bought the good old-fashioned kind of grinder that you attach to something really solid and power with the muscles of your strong right arm. However, that was harder work than we effete moderns were used to, so we gave that one away and invested in an electric model. That does the job quickly and comfortably and we expect to stay with it.

Another advantage to grinding our own chopped steak is that it allows us to control just how much fat we want to grind in with the lean meat. You want a decent amount of fat (”The fat’s where the flavor is,” remember), and the best way to get the proportions right is trial and error. The true gourmets among us actually might want different proportions for different dishes, but if you are one such, for that you are on your own.

So grind in good health, dear friends, and next time you’re making meatloaf, you can invite us over.

    Peripherally inserted central catheter.
    (Photo by Pinkfud.)

A few days ago I had what’s called a PICC line installed in my right arm. This isn’t a big deal; it’s just a tube that they run up through one of your big veins to transport things like antibiotics to where they’ll do the most good. There are other ways to do that job — for instance to lie in a hospital bed for a week or so and have a nurse come by and stick a needle in you every now and then. That works just as well, but with the PICC line you can go home and do it yourself.

I wouldn’t even have mentioned it except for a coincidence. There’s a tiny possibility of some kinds of problems, like infections. The day after I got the thing, there was a story in the paper about how widely hospitals varied in the number of serious infections they gave patients who got the procedure. The number they’re all supposed to aim for is zero, but not one of the hospitals in this study made it. Some give their patients hardly any, others more than they like to admit to. (Which is really shameful because this is one of the absolute easiest to prevent problems in medicine. The most important thing the OR people need to do to eliminate them is wash their hands.)

So what I’d like to know, if any of you know the answer, is how many patients do get infected from these procedures. Any of you happen to know anything about that?

This isn’t urgent, by the way. I don’t even know anybody who had such an infection. It’s just curiosity, which is to say it’s a part of my plan for all of us to know everything so we can educate the rest of the world.

Gertrude and Isaac Asimov. (Photo by Jay Kay Klein.)

When World War II ended, Isaac Asimov’s stint as a war research scientist came to an end. Then he said good-bye (or at least au revoir to his associate researchers, because he was pretty sure to be seeing at least Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp again) and headed for the normalcy of a return to civilian life.

That, however, was not to be. His draft board had other ideas. His work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard had preserved him from being called up as long as he was doing the work. Now he wasn’t doing it any more. He was quickly promoted to become classified 1A in the Selective Service’s eyes, and shortly thereafter promoted again, now becoming Asimov, Pvt Isaac.

This was not a development Isaac had sought. Worse, it soon became a development he couldn’t live with at all, because the Army had a plan for him. With his education and his record of writing about the future, he was a natural to be selected as an observer at some upcoming military tests.

They were not tests Isaac wanted to observe. Indeed, he saw nothing but trouble, bad trouble, if that scenario was followed.

The USA had invented the atomic bomb and used it to speed the end of the war. Now it wanted to set off test bombs under experimental conditions, several of the things, so it could learn as quickly as possible just how to use this ultimate weapon. The higher-ups had scheduled several such tests, far off in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, and the plan was that formations of GIs would be present at every firing — to observe and protect, they said, but the suspicious-minded wondered if the tests were also likely to provide useful information about the effects of radiation on healthy young men.

There was also a political problem. The Soviet Union, America’s most potent wartime ally, had with the peace become its deadliest rival. The papers were filling up with lurid stories about Soviet spies lurking everywhere, trying to steal America’s secrets — trying hardest to learn everything that could be learned about the atom bomb and how to make one of their own. And, Private Asimov, in what country did you say you were born?

Private Asimov pointed out that he had warned of this problem to every authority figure he could find who would listen. It took a while before he could find one who was willing to do that, and by then he was well on his way to the test site. But then things improved. Isaac not only was taken off the A-bomb detail, his draft status was reviewed and he was a civilian again.

There was one bad feature. They insisted on flying him back to the States. But Isaac put up with that, confident that if he survived that ordeal he would never have to get in a plane again.

 
Since, being Jewish, Isaac was not going to be allowed to attend any decent medical school, he had no hope of ever putting the letters M.D. after his name. Next best, he thought, would be a Ph.D., and the discipline that he wanted to get the award in, he decided, was organic chemistry. And while he was working toward that goal there was one other accomplishment he wanted to achieve. He wanted to get married, because Isaac had a girl.

Her name was Gertrude Blugerman. If you picked out the letters D-E-A-R-E-S-T on your telephone keypad in those years she was the person (assuming you were dialing in New York City) who would answer.

I think that tells you an important fact about Isaac right there. Oh, of course it was only dumb luck that gave Isaac’s girl an endearing phone number. That sort of pure chance could have happened to anyone. But if it had happened to almost any other young man, it is likely that neither he nor the girl would ever have known. It takes a certain kind of mind to ring up changes on all the numbers and phrases and facts that come one’s way — the kind of mind that Isaac Asimov was born with, and that made him the writer he was.

All this time, of course, Isaac was writing science fiction, mostly for John Campbell but now and then for others. He had already established the two main currents in his fiction: The positronic robot stories (Why were they positronic? I asked him that once and he said, “Because the positron had just been added to the list of particles and no one knew what it could and couldn’t do.”) and the Foundation series.

So what else can I tell you about Isaac Asimov at this stage? His favorite breakfast was a can of Campbell’s vegetable-beef soup. As far as his general dietary choices were concerned, his family didn’t keep kosher but were not very adventurous in diet. But Isaac liked to try new things when he and I ate out together. Not all experiments were successes, When the two of us lunched one day and discovered the restaurant was offering soft-shell crabs, which neither of us had ever tried, we gave them a shot. Once was enough for me — I didn’t like their slippery feel in my mouth — but Isaac’s verdict was that he didn’t really like them but might give them another chance some time.

(More parts to come, as I write them.)

 
Related posts:

• Isaac
• Isaac, Part 2
• Isaac, Part 4
• Isaac, Part 5
• Russians, Jews and Isaac

I’ve been thinking about a little girl I heard of — I’ll call her Susan, because that wasn’t her name. Susan’s mother was HIV positive two years ago, when Susan was born. There is a treatment for children being born of HIV-positive mothers and it works well, but for religious reasons Susan’s mother wouldn’t allow the doctors to treat Susan. So Susan died of AIDS at the age of two.

The game is that you and I pretend that we’re the U.S Senate and we’re writing a law about Susan and her mother. Do we conclude that Susan’s mother has committed a crime? And, if so, what is the crime, and what is the punishment?

Leave your comments here.