The Way the Future Blogs

I have the dog. . . .

For the science-minded among us, there’s a home scientific experiment that you might like to try. For it, you will need the following research materials:

4–6 little opaque cups with lids
1 piece of tasty dog food
1 baby about 1 year old
1 pet dog
1 domesticated wolf
(optional) 1 each bonobo, chimpanzee, gorilla and other great ape

Procedure: In a room where none of the animals are present put the piece of tasty dog food in one of the cups, cover it and line them up on a table. Admit one of the animals. Point to the cup containing the dog food. Observe the response of the animal.

In general, if the animal used in this trial is either the pet dog or the baby of about 1 year or more in age it will then attempt to open the cup. If successful in that effort, it will then eat the piece of dog food. If it is any other kind of animal, it will probably pay little or no attention to your signal but will sniff each of the cups, perhaps attempt to lick your face or simply wander around the room.

You will probably suppose from this behavior that the dog and the baby have inferred that you are calling attention to the one cup that contains a reward — the piece of dog food — for the subject animal and thus attempt to find out what that reward is, whereas none of the other animals will appear to draw that conclusion. At least, that is the conclusion reached by the team of ethologists led by Jozsef Topal at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

Interestingly, no other kind of living creature displays this ability to interpret a human signal except for the domestic dog and the human baby, which begins to be able to solve the problem of interpreting this nonverbal human signal around its first birthday. The wolf is the closest relative to the domestic dog, but even a wolf that has been raised since birth in the company of human beings, as well as any of the great apes, the closest species to human beings, fails miserably at this task.

It is suggested that this innate quality of dogs is what has made them particularly easy to domesticate.

    Robert A. Heinlein
 

I mentioned that greatest of Campbell-era sf writers, Robert A. Heinlein, a while ago, and that got me to thinking about the man and what it was like to be his editor, at least for the magazine publication of a lot of his work. So I went poking around some musty old papers (and some of the even mustier crevices of my brain) and produced some memories to share with those of you who are interested.

As many of you (especially the ones who have read The Way the Future Was) already know, at the age of nineteen, principally because of dumb luck, I found myself the editor of two professional science-fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super-Science Stories, and one of my contributors was that same Robert Heinlein.

I hasten to add that that statement conveys an implication which is unjustified. In such a relationship, it is supposed to be the editor who makes the buy-or-bounce decisions, and therefore it is the editor who dominates it.

In this case, that was incorrect. It happens there is a member of my immediate family who exemplifies the Pohl–Heinlein relationship of that period more accurately. Her name is Milly. She is a nine-year-old Jack Russell, and at every meal she sits at my feet, waiting for me to finish so she can lick the crumbs off my plate. This well describes how things were between Robert and me around 1940. Everything he wrote went at once to John Campbell. The few stories that John rejected went to me — to be run only under a pseudonym, to be sure, because that was how John had decreed it.

Still, it wasn’t too bad either for Milly or me. Milly makes a decent living out of my dinner plates (she also gets regular dog food, of course, but I know which she prefers), and I got some nice stories that John had been too opinionated to publish.

Of course, later on things improved for me. By the time I was editing Galaxy and If in the 1960s, John and Bob had suffered some sort of cooling off, and so I got the choice of everything Bob wrote. I didn’t buy it all, but I did buy quite a lot.

For years I was under the impression that the explanation for this was that Robert, for whatever reason, had told his agent not to offer anything to John. I’ve since been told that that’s wrong; the novels were indeed submitted first to Campbell and he rejected every one. If this is true, as I am forced to believe, then it just proves that even the best of editors has occasional fits of idiocy.

Anyway, I was, I admit, a little rueful about the Heinleins I was publishing because Robert had by then apparently begun to run out of steam. Novels like Podkayne of Mars were reasonably cute, but a long way below the products of his glory years. Then, without warning, along came The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, not only right up there with his best but maybe his very best novel ever. I began running it at once.

Naturally it won that year’s Hugo (so did the magazine I ran it in, largely because I had been lucky enough to get such good serials), and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

 
More to come. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′

Me and Milly.

 
Today, Frederik Pohl completes his 90th trip around the Sun.

His wife and 18 of the best sf writers alive planned to celebrate by presenting him with a festschrift book containing stories and personal reminiscences on his birthday, but health problems interfered (not so much his as Betty Anne’s, the editor’s, who fell and cracked a caudal vertebra, requiring surgery, and then needed more surgery for an unrelated complaint, with longish recovery times for each), and pub date has been delayed till June 2010.

But Happy Birthday, anyway!