The Way the Future Blogs

How I Came to Edit Frederik Pohl
Guest post by James Frenkel

James Frenkel (Photo by Joshua Frenkel)

For years I wanted to edit the works of Frederik Pohl. I loved his fiction, and not just the novels, but a lot of his stories as well. I also thought he was a terrific editor, because I read Galaxy and Worlds of If magazines in the 1960s, and when Fred was the editor they published a lot of great science fiction. So when I starting to work in book publishing and then began to edit science fiction for Dell Books, I thought it would be extremely cool to get Fred to write for Dell.

But I didn’t have a chance. The first time I ever really talked with him, at, I think, the Secondary Universe Conference at Queensborough Community College in New York City in 1969, he was polite, but I was not even close to being an editor yet. I was still in college, and meeting a bunch of big-name science fiction people all at once, and overwhelmed by the experience. It seemed to me that everywhere I looked was someone whose books or stories I had read: Poul Anderson, Ben Bova, Lester Del Rey, Gordon R. Dickson, Frederik Pohl … and lots of others, including Ivor Rogers, who wasn’t an SF writer, but did write the occasional article for Time Magazine. and was a fascinating participant.

So years later, when I was now editing SF for Dell, I knew who Fred was, and I knew that he was hot — Gateway had just been published, and if he hadn’t been famous enough before, for all of his previous accomplishments, Gateway made him nothing short of the hottest SF writer on the planet. He was published by Del Rey Books, which was arguably the best sf and fantasy publisher in the world at that moment. It took enormous courage for me to even introduce myself to him, but I managed to do it — I think it was during Lunacon, New York’s annual SF convention. And then I asked him if he’d like to have lunch sometime and maybe talk about publishing a book with Dell.

I have the feeling that he humored me because he knew that an editor for a major publisher could afford to take him out for a very nice lunch at a fine New York restaurant. I don’t know for sure, but he did agree to lunch with me, and we did so, at a nice place on the East Side in Kips Bay … I remember it was Italian food, and I was really nervous. And when I asked him what he was working on — a classic opening line for an editor to dangle the bait of publication to an author — he readily told me that he had just finished the sequel to Gateway … and Del Rey was going to publish it, of course.

And before I could ask much more about future books, he let me know that he was very happy wit Del Rey. They were paying him well, advertising and promoting his books well, and he had more books under contract to them.

Basically he was telling me that it would be a cold day in Hell before I had any chance at all of getting to buy the right to publish one of his books. So why, I thought, was I buying him lunch?

Continue reading ‘Bearding the Wild Pohl’ »

The conclusion of “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation,” recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
 

Alfred Bester, 1979 (Photo by Frank Olynyk).

Audience: What’s it like to start writing the next book after you have written, say, The Demolished Man?

Bester: I’ve just finished a book about a month ago and I’m absolutely pooped — there’s nothing left. It happens with me when I’ve finished something big like a novel. Not a script — with a script or a short story, next week you write another one. But with a book, I’m exhausted.

Now at my advanced age I know better — I leave it alone and the next thing I know, a few weeks, a couple of months maybe, an idea begins to niggle me and the next thing I know I’m beginning to dream and think about it. Who’s as surprised as me when there’s something in my head and there’s my legal pad, and a book is formed? You just have to wait for the battery to recharge. I just wait patiently and it starts all over again. There are so many ideas that one has.

I may think, “Ah yes, there’s that play that I’ve been meaning to write for a long time and I’m going to start on that play,” and the next thing I know it’s going to turn into a novel. You don’t know what will happen — you’re constantly surprised.

Pohl: You’re a much more organized person than I am. I don’t work on one thing at a time. I usually have eight or 10 projects going at one time. I work on one until I’m bored, and don’t know what to do next. Then I put it away and work on another. So the point never really comes where I have to say this day I start from scratch with something new, but each day, to the extent possible with the vicissitudes of travel or something, I do some writing!

Every day. I find that sometimes it gets a little treacherous though because I want to write the same scene in three different novels. There are two novels that I’m working on now and I’ve got a great scene and I want it in both of them.

Bester: I’ve stolen scenes from myself many a time and been ashamed.

Audience: Do you consider the increasing commercialism of science fiction will have a detrimental effect on the future?

Pohl: The increasing commercialism of science fiction has worried me sometimes because it seems to me that the prices have got pretty high and it’s a sort of South Sea Bubble thing that is going to bust before long. But I don’t think it’ll affect any writer seriously. Writers that are good enough to command the sky-high prices that are going on, especially science-fiction writers, are generally also so damn stubborn that they’re going to do what they want to do anyhow. And not too many of the first-rank writers that I know are going to worry about commercialism. They will do their thing.

From time to time I’ve flirted with things like television where you can’t really do your thing unless you have a commanding position and have spent 20 years earning it, but I don’t want to do that, even though I could make much more money and reach a wider audience. It’s not my thing. And most of the writers I know will not do what they don’t want to do, no matter what sort of money is about.

Bester: I agree completely. I do an occasional science-fiction special, but I can’t write for any of the standard shows. The coast — Hollywood — is impossible.

There’s a little gag: What is a camel? A camel is a horse designed by a committee. Out on the coast, it is all committee work.

Pohl: Yes, all these people have to justify their salaries by having an opinion! If they don’t have an opinion, they’re fired.

Bester: Which they impose on you. I’m all kinds of author, but I’ve never yet written anything in which I’ve not been in complete control. And I just will not put up with committee work.

Audience: Another person who comes to mind as somebody who has tried very hard to do his own thing within the framework of media work is Harlan Ellison!

Pohl: Harlan does his own thing. Harlan chooses for reasons not known to me to flagellate himself by going back and writing episodes of The Flying Nun from time to time. Why he does this I don’t really know; he doesn’t need the money.

Bester: Harlan did a Star Trek script and it was the one good script that they had. Harlan’s a marvelous writer, there’s no doubt about it.

Pohl: The reason I don’t get involved in film and top TV, is neither that I’m allergic to money nor above that sort of thing. It’s just that I don’t want to deal with all those people. One maniac editor is all that I can handle at one time; 27 lunatic network executives would just drive me insane.

AD: But Fred, now you’ve achieved enough clout to get away with it.

Pohl: I can get away with it until they come back and say, “NBC loves your idea but they won’t allow you to do what you said you want to do.” And then I walk away.

A couple of years ago, I was coming to Los Angeles and my Hollywood agent called me up and said: “When you come, I’ve got somebody for you to meet. He’s a producer and he wants you to write a script for him.”

And I said: “What kind of script?”

“It’s a Japanese monster movie!”

Continue reading ‘Me and Alfie, Part 8: Hollywood and the Name Game’ »

Part 4 of “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation,” recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
 

Bester: I’m curious, Fred. Where did you get the idea for The Space Merchants?

Pohl: The Space Merchants has a long history. During World War II, I was with the American Air Force in Italy. I got a little homesick, and I’d brought my typewriter with me. I’d carried that damn thing all over World War II hoping some time to find a use for it and I did.

I thought I’d write a novel about New York City to make me feel a little better. And the most exciting thing I could think of to write about in New York City was the advertising business — which was a glamorous sort of thing —-and I wrote this novel for some 300 pages or so, called For Some We Loved. It’s a quotation from Omar Khayyam. I was 23 years old, what did I know?

And then the war was over and I got back home, and I looked at the novel and perceived there was something wrong with it. What was wrong with it was that I didn’t know anything about the advertising business, and I had written this whole novel that dealt with it. But I knew how to solve that problem. I looked in the Sunday New York Times, classified advertising section, and I saw three or four help-wanted ads for advertising copywriters. I’d never been an advertising copywriter, but it looked easy. So I answered a couple of the ads and one of them hired me, and I spent a couple of years there.

Bester: What agency was it, Fred?

Pohl: A little tiny thing called Thwing & Altman, mostly book accounts. We did the Dollar Book Club and the Literary Guild and William Wise. I got to be pretty good at writing advertising.

And, at some point during those years, I had a summer place in upstate New York looking out over a lake with a big fireplace, and I had my manuscript of my novel For Some We Loved with me, and one night, I began to read it in front of the fireplace and as I read each page, I tossed them in the fire one by one.

Bester: Oh, Fred, no! That’s terrible.

Pohl: It was awful. The concept was painful … but the novel itself was agonizing. I had no choice.

So here I had all this knowledge of advertising and no longer had a book to put it in. Also Fred Wakeman had come out with The Hucksters by then, so it was no longer really a fresh idea for a regular mainstream novel. Then it occurred to me to make a science-fiction novel about advertising, and I began tentatively putting words on paper — a little bit at a time, because by then I had a full-time job running a literary agency. And when I had put about 20,000 words on paper over about a year or two, I showed it to Horace Gold.

Bester: What did Horace have to say?

Pohl: He said, “I am now running Alfie Bester’s The Demolished Man—”

Bester: Leave me out of this, will you?

Pohl: I swear to God, that was what he said. And: “I haven’t got anything to follow it up with. There’s nothing else coming in that looks as if it’ll stand up to The Demolished Man. So I’m going to start with the first installment now, and by next Tuesday please have the second and the third.”

And I said, “There’s no way I can do that. I have a full-time job with the agency.”

And he said, “I don’t care whether you can do it or not, the printers will be waiting.”

So I went back to my home in New Jersey where my old friend Cyril Kornbluth, with whom I’d written a lot of stories before, was staying with me. He read over the part I’d written, the first third or so and said, “Yeah, yeah, we can do something with that.” So he rewrote that and added some, and I rewrote that and added some, and we barely got it into print, but actually the first part was being set before the last was written.

Bester: My God, you were living dangerously, Fred!

Pohl: I had nothing to lose. It was Horace’s problem!

Bester: Whose title was it — Horace’s or yours?

Pohl: I called it something ridiculous like “Fall Campaign,” and Horace put “Gravy Planet” on it.

There was a big book boom in science fiction at the time, all sorts of publishers deciding to bring it out in hardcovers. So, I thought, what the hell, I’ll sell it as a book, and I was a literary agent, and I knew every publisher and editor in New York, especially the ones that dealt in science fiction — a lot of them were very good friends of mine. So I took it off to one, and I said, “Here, print this. It’s pretty good stuff,” and he read it and gave it back and said, “No, that’s not really what I meant at all!”

And I said, “So much for you,” and I took it to the next one. And it was rejected by every publisher in America who then had a science-fiction line.

Bester: So was The Demolished Man, sir! It was bounced by everybody.

Pohl: Well, I think it’s the same story.

So, there was no publisher left to offer it to. Then Ian Ballantine started up his own company, and he was so inexperienced as a publisher that he didn’t know this was unpublishable. So he published it! You know, it’s been translated into 45 languages now.

Bester: It shows you, the greatest books in the world can be bounced by anybody. Look at Fred’s! The greatest science fiction novel of all time. Bounced by everybody! It’s preposterous!

 
To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• Alfie, Part 1, Part 2
• Me and Alfie, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

 
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’ »

    Betty Ballantine

Husband-wife editing and publishing teams are not common in the real world of books. In fact, I only know of three, and, interestingly, all three made their biggest successes in the field of science fiction. Lester and Judy Lynn Del Rey were the first publishers to break sf and fantasy titles into the New York Times’ revered weekly lists of bestsellers. (We discussed them here some time ago.). A little later, Donald and Elsie Wollheim scored with their DAW (for Donald Allen Wollheim) Books. We will come to them in the (fairly) near future.

The third team to qualify for this rare distinction was Ian and Betty Ballantine, whom we will look at now, and in some ways the Ballantines were the most remarkable of all.

The Ballantines didn’t simply create one publishing house and build it into a great success. They created two of the most successful publishers, particularly of paperbacks, in America, as well as a number of less spectacular, but still quite successful, other imprints … and it all started with a term paper Ian wrote at the age of 21, when he was still a student at the London School of Economics.

 
Ian Ballantine

Ian Ballantine

Ian Ballantine was born, on September 25th of the year 1916, into an interesting family. His father, Edward J. Ballantine, was a celebrated actor on the London stage and, although his mother, Stella, made few Page-1 headlines, her Aunt Emma made enough for any family.

Once, when I was chatting with Ian about books, I might like to write, I happened to mention that Emma Goldman, the famed anarchist, had been jailed once — not for planning assassinations (Henry Clay Frick, the railroad and steel tycoon known as “the most hated man in America” was her favorite target), but for distributing information about birth control.

Ian was grinning at me before I finished. “Did you not know that you’re talking about my Aunt Emma?” he asked.

Continue reading ‘Couples Who Mastered Publishing, No. 2:
The Ballantines’ »

Hal Clement, right, hands me the Skylark Award at Boskone 2 in 1966. The con chairman, Dave Vanderwerf, looks on.

Hal Clement was a nearly ideal client Almost everything he wrote was a sure sale.

The only real problem was that Hal (whose real name was Harry C. Stubbs) found it almost impossible to say no to a publishing-minded friend. He had written a really good novel called Mission of Gravity, but unfortunately, before I came on the scene, Harry had given it to the semi-pro sf book publishing company Shasta Publishers as part of a complex package deal intended to include a paperback and assorted other editions. Unfortunately, as happened with a number of the semi-pros, problems intervened, and the whole project came to shuddering stop.

Meanwhile Hal’s fine novel, perhaps the best he ever wrote, was lingering in hyperspace, waiting for some means to be devised so that readers could at last enjoy it.

Cleaning up log-jams of this sort is one of the most important duties of a literary agent. I went to work on the problem and before long had a release from Harry’s commitments to Shasta and the several other publishers involved in the deal, thus freeing me to send it where I had always known it belonged for its first appearance — that is as a serial in Astounding, John Campbell’s magazine.

Who promptly rejected it.

What Campbell said in his letter of rejection was something like, “wonderful story, Fred, but as you see it simply doesn’t divide well into three installments.”

That brings us directly to the second most important part of an agent’s duties, which is namely to prevent editors from making total fools of themselves. So I didn’t argue with John. I didn’t say anything at all to him. I just put the manuscript in the bottom drawer of my desk for a few weeks. Then I took it out and looked at it.

It was some 300 pages long. I turned to page 100 and hunted around until I found something that could be construed as a cliffhanger, and I marked that “Part 2.” I did the same on page 200, marking that one “Part 3,” and then I gave the ms. to my secretary, instructing her to retype three or four pages before and after those pages, and when she had done that I sent it back to John with a little note.

I didn’t lie to him in the note. I hardly ever lied to an editor, except when absolutely necessary. I just said, “How do you like it now?” And he sent back a check, and it was just about the best-liked serial he ever printed.

 
When I stopped being an agent, Harry and I remained good friends. Actually, we ran into each other just about as often as before, because both Harry and I enjoyed most of the East Coast’s annual cons and were generally invited to them. The best feature of them, in my view, was Harry’s every-con lecture on what was new in astronomy.

Between Harry’s talks and Isaac Asimov’s once-a-month column in F&SF, I considered myself the most scientifically up-to-date layman in Red Bank, New Jersey. Would they both were with us still.

 
Related post:
Hal Clement: Major Harry Stubbs