The Way the Future Blogs

Part 2 of my memories of Gene Roddenberry

  Gene Roddenberry

When the studio announced that Star Trek had been canceled after its second year, I took the news philosophically. I had more or less stopped watching it, and Gene Roddenberry had already taken me to previews of a couple of other science-fiction shows he was developing. (None of them actually did much.)

Gene, however, was not so easily defeated A few weeks after the announcement I got a letter from him asking if I would be willing to sign a letter asking the network to reverse itself and give Star Trek at least one more season to show its legs. Gene was not very specific about just what sort of letter it would be. I supposed it would be some sort of group letter signed by a bunch of old sf codgers. I had no objection to that, or indeed to any imaginable kind of letter he might have in mind. I could not think of any serious trouble such a thing might cause me, and I was quite willing to do Gene a favor.

I then forgot about it for a few weeks, until one day I got a letter from an eleven-year-old in some place like Albuquerque, New Mexico, and addressed to “Frederik Pohl, editor of Galaxy, If and Analog.” Its burden was a heartfelt plea for me to change my mind about canceling Star Trek and put it back on the air for at least one more year.

That was a rather puzzling letter. How did he get my home address? What made him believe I had anything to do with canceling the program? Most of all, what made anyone think that I was the editor of Analog, a post that had belonged to John Campbell since the Early Silurian?

It was not a great concern, though, and it had receded to the shadowy recesses of my consciousness when. A couple of days later I got a similar letter from a nine-year-old in a place like Freehold. New Jersey … and then more, many more, from youngsters all over the country, and all displaying the same errors concerning my control over Star Trek’s fortunes and what magazines I happened to edit..

So I got in touch with Gene to ask, just as a matter of interest, what he knew about those letters.

I already had figured out the basic structure of what was going on. TV shows get a heavy dose of fan mail — in the case of Star Trek largely from young boys — and somebody connected with the show had saved all those return addresses on the envelopes and converted them into a mailing list. (I knew all about such lists. Dirk Wylie and I had got his literary agency started by mailing an invitation to a list of the same kind, although much smaller, this one taken from the return addresses on manuscripts submitted to Popular Publications’ pulp magazines.)

In his reply Gene admitted that they had written a letter to all those thousands of fans, suggesting they write letters to get the program extended — but phrased a little confusingly, which is no doubt how come so many of them thought I was the executioner. He hoped I wasn’t mad because, in the heat of the action, they had sent out the letter — bearing my signature — without showing it to me. I wasn’t mad, and wrote back to tell him so.
 

Bjo Trimble, in costume, with William Shatner
on the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, ca. 1979.

I wasn’t the only string to Gene’s bow. As I learned later, Harlan Ellison was trying to whip up pressure from the TV professionals, and Bjo Trimble and her husband were attempting to do the same among fan groups.

How well they did, I don’t know, but how well that letter under my name did was very. I have a statement from a person actually on the scene at the network that the executives were astonished and in no small degree worried at the volume and vigor of (correctly addressed) mail it produced.

And, in fact, the network did suddenly announce that they’d thought it over and, after all, they would let Star Trek stay on the air for one more season.

Related post:
Gene Roddenberry

My dear friend Jack Williamson, who died a few years ago, was ten or eleven years older than I, and I didn’t actually meet him — in the flesh, that is, though I certainly knew and revered him through his wonderful stories — until he was an elderly 30 and I was 19, and just beginning a life of my own. Jack, of course, had been living his own life for a decade or more, and an interesting life it was: coming to New Mexico in a covered wagon as a child., sailing down the Mississippi with another writer , finding the love of his life when they were kids — and then losing her — and finding her again when she became widowed. But as I wasn’t there for those busy times I can’t tell you about them.

Fortunately Jack himself could, and did in his marvelous autobiography, Wonder’s Child, which you should get your hands on and read. For me, the personal story of John Stuart Williamson begins with the first World Science Fiction Convention, in New York City in 1939, which Jack attended, and I and six other Futurians were thrown out of. (That’s a long story that I’m getting a little tired of telling, but I’ll do it by and by for the blog — and anyway it’s in my own autobiog, The Way the Future Was. Which is out of print but will be available real soon now as an ebook from Baen. Don’t worry, I’ll mention it in the blog when it is available.)

Actually, although I had never knowingly been within a thousand miles of Jack in the flesh, he had in fact already caused one significant change in my life. At the age of ten or eleven I was already hooked on sf. In those years science fiction in America came only in the form of the canonical pulp-paper magazines Amazing, Wonder (under several variations of title) and Astounding. I was able to afford all three only because I was able to buy them for a nickel or a dime apiece in a second-hand magazine store. (Depression days, remember. There were second-hand everything stores everywhere.)

That was fine for me until 1931, when I had a stroke of good — or more accurately of bipolar, mixed good and bad — luck. The good part was that someone had parted with his copy of the current Amazing while it was still on the stands, and so I had read the first half of a two-part serial at the same time time as the rich people. That serial was Jack’s The Stone From the Green Star. The bad part was that God alone knew when the next issue of Amazing, with the conclusion of the story, would fall into my hands. It might be months, might even be a year or more.

Could I stand waiting that long to learn how it all came out?

I could not. I had a way of dealing with the problem, though. My lunch allowance was 25¢ a day, enough for a 20¢ Western sandwich at the cafeteria down the street and a 5¢ glass of milk to wash it down. All I had to do was skip lunch for one day of the next week and that brand-new Amazing was mine. I didn’t hesitate. I did it. I never regretted it, either.

It is true, of course, that in the judgment of most authorities The Stone from the Green Star is by a wide margin the least of Jack’s novels. But what did I know? I was eleven years old, and addicted.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
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• Jack the Wonderful Williamson, Part 2, Part 3

I don’t know what kind of a writer I would have been if I hadn’t met Dirk Wylie and, through him and with him, the whole world of science-fiction fandom. Much the same, I imagine. I almost certainly would have been some kind of a writer — I’m hardly fit for anything else. And I had been trying to write sf at least a year before I met Dirk, in idle moments in classes in the eighth grade. But it would have taken a lot longer.

I owe a lot to fandom. From Don Wollheim, John Michel, Doc Lowndes — and later from Cyril Kornbluth, Dick Wilson, Isaac Asimov and others — I learned something about what they were learning about writing; we all showed each other our stories, when we weren’t actually collaborating on them. In the fan mags, I acquired the skills necessary to prepare something for public viewing — and the courage to permit it.

What I am not as sure of is whether all the things we learned then were worth learning.

Science fiction was purely a pulp category in those days. Sometimes the emphasis was on gadgetry, sometimes on blood-and-thunder adventure; when it was best, the high spots were vistas of new worlds and new kinds of life. In no case was it on belles-lettres, nor was it a place to look for fresh insights into the human condition. What we learned from each other and from the world around us was the hardware of writing. Narrative hooks. Time-pressure to make a story move. Character tags — not characterization, but oddities, quirks, bits of business to make a person in a story not alive but identifiable. So I learned how to invent ray-guns and how to make a story march, but it was not for a long, long time that I began to try to learn how to use a story to say something that needed saying.

In fact, when I look back at the science-fiction magazines of the twenties and the early thirties, the ones that hooked me on sf, I sometimes wonder just what it was we all found in them to shape our lives around.

I think there were two things. One is that science fiction was a way out of a bad place; the other, that it was a window on a better one.

The world really was in bad trouble. Money trouble. The Great Depression was not just a few million people out of work or a thousand banks gone shaky. It was fear. And it was worldwide. Somehow or other the economic life of the human race had got itself off the tracks. No one was quite sure it would get straight again. No one could be sure that his own life was not going to be disastrously changed, and science fiction offered an escape from all that.

The other thing about the world was that technology had just begun to make itself a part of everyone’s life. Every day there were new miracles. Immense new buildings. Giant airships. Huge ocean liners. Man flew across the Atlantic and circled the South Pole. Cars went faster, tunnels went deeper, the Empire State Building stretched a fifth of a mile into the sky, radio brought you the voice of a singer a continent away.

It was clear that behind all this growth and acceleration something was happening, and that it would not stop happening with huge Zeppelins and giant buildings but would go on and on. What science fiction was about was the going on. The next step, and the step after that. Not just radio, but television. Not just the conquest of the air, but the conquest of space.

Of course, not even science fiction was telling us much about the price tag on progress. It told us about the future of the automobile; it didn’t tell us that sulphur-dioxide pollution would crumble the stone in the buildings that lined the streets. It told us about high-speed aircraft, but not about sonic boom; about atomic energy, but not about fallout; about organ transplants and life prolongation, but not about the dreary agony of overpopulation.

Nobody else was telling us about these things, either. A decade or two later science fiction picked up on the gloom behind the glamour very quickly, and maybe too completely. But in those early days we were as innocent as physicists, popes and presidents. We saw only the promise, not the threat.

And truthfully we weren’t looking for threats. We were looking for beauty and challenge. When we couldn’t find them on Earth, we looked outside for prettier, more satisfying places. Mars. Venus. The made-up planets of invented stars somewhere off in the middle of the galaxy, or in galaxies farther away still.

I think we all believed as an article of faith that there were other intelligent races in the universe than our own, plenty of them. (I still believe it! What puzzles me is why we haven’t seen any of them as visitors. I wish I could swallow the flying-saucer stories — I can’t; the evidence just isn’t good. But the absence of hard facts hasn’t shaken my faith that Osnomians and Fenachrone are out there somewhere.) If polled, I am sure we would have agreed that wherever there’s a planet, there’s life — or used to be, or will be.

Now, alas, we know that the odds are not as good as we had hoped, especially for our own solar system. The local real estate is pretty low quality. Mercury is too hot and has too little air; Venus is too hot and has too much, and poisonous at that. Mars is still a possibility, but not by any means a good one — and what else is there? But in the mid-thirties we didn’t know as much as we do now. The big telescopes hadn’t yet been completed, and of course no spaceship had yet brought a TV camera to Mars or the Moon.

But we believed.

 
Stay tuned. . . .

 
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• Basement and Empire
• Basement and Empire, Part 2: Science Fiction Meetings
• Basement and Empire, Afterwords
• The Quadrumvirate
• Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 2: School Days
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 3: A Brooklyn Boyhood
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 4: New Deal, New Worlds
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 5: The Big League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 7: The Crusade

I don’t know if you’ve ever met Vince Monte, who holds the title of My No. 1 Fan. He’s a well informed person with a collection that, apart from foreign editions, is much better than my own, and when he asks a question, I do my best to answer it.

This time the question had to do with pen names, of which I admittedly have, over the years, used a number. Vince sent me a list of 14 names that I have at some time or other used, and what is noteworthy about the list is that it does not include Frederik Pohl, a name I have used quite often. So let me try to answer Vince’s question, as follows:

• Ernst Mason
  This is the name I used for my nonfiction biography of the Roman emperor Tiberius. I wanted a name that was not identified with me or with science fiction, though when I then wrote about Tiberius for the Encyclopedia Britannica, the editor encouraged me to go back to my own name. Ernst Mason was created by taking the family name of my maternal grandfather, William Mason, and adding it to the given name of my paternal one, Ernst Pohl.

• S.D. Gottesman
  Name used on some early collaborations with Cyril Kornbluth. He picked it, I think taken from the name of one of his high-school teachers.

• Dirk Wylie
  Not my name, the name taken by my high-school pal Joseph Harold Dockweiler when he got tired of the name his parents had picked for him. The precipitating incident was the plan of Dirk, Dick Wilson and Don Wollheim to rent an apartment together, and Dick and Donald demanded that Dirk had a name starting with a D.

• Charles Satterfield
  Horace Gold laid this one on me. He wanted me to use a new pseudonym for one of my stories in Galaxy, I said I was tired of inventing pseudonyms, he said, “Then I will.” He had a prizefight going on the TV, Ezzard Charles against Bob Satterfield, and he said, “There’s your name.” What we didn’t know was that there was a real man named Charles Satterfield, but he apparently never saw the story, or didn’t care.

• Jordan Park
  Jordan Park was a pen name of Cyril’s. I just wrote part of one Jordan Park story.

• Paul Dennis Lavond
  Used for a few three-way collaborations; P for Pohl, D for Dirk, L for Lowndes.

• Elton Andrews
  Sometimes Elton V. Andrews, once or twice just the initials, eva. My first professional sale, a poem to Amazing Stories, was signed with this. I have no idea why I picked it.

• James MacCreigh
  My most frequently used pen name, not just for sf but for other pulps and for my first attempts at non-pulp sales.

• Edson McCann
  Joint penname with Lester del Rey. After we had written the book we used that name on, Lester realized that the name could be written as EM.CC and read, if we chose, as E = mc².

• Donald Stacy
  I think, repeat THINK, that this was the name (or pseudonym) of someone who had written a novel about TV called The God of Channel One, which Ian Ballantine had bought but was dissatisfied with and asked me to do a rewrite on.

• Paul Flehr, Warren F. Howard, Scott Mariner
  They sound sort of familiar. I think I did use them, but I don’t remember where or why.

There may have been others.

When I was quite new to all this, I confess I had a romantic view of pseudonyms. By “romantic,” I mean as in a boy-meets-girl scene like this one:

I imagined myself sitting at a soda fountain — I didn’t say cocktail bar, I said soda fountain, which gives an idea of how old I was — and there was an extremely good-looking girl sitting a stool or two away, reading a story of mine, and my plan was to wait until she had finished it and then let her knows that the pen name on the story was me.

Never happened, though. Probably just as well. My wife probably wouldn’t like it.

Isaac Asimov, 1965.

All this time Isaac was continuing to write for John Campbell — Foundation stories, robot stories, all kinds of stories. Perhaps his biggest hit for John, though, wasn’t exactly a story. It was what came to be called “a non-fact article,” this one a dead-pan scientific report on a compound called “thiotimoline,” which had the curious property of beginning to dissolve before it was added to a solvent.

For a time I was back in the literary-agency business, handling Isaac among most of the other top sf writers in the world. The publishing of science fiction in book form in the U.S. had just begun, and I wanted Isaac to get in on it. The trouble was that Doubleday, the most interesting of the hardcover houses, had decided that they wanted new works, not reprinted serials taken from the pulps. (It was a dumb decision, and later, when they realized what they were missing out on and reversed it they made a fortune out of those old Foundation and robot books.)

But at the time that was policy and I couldn’t argue them out of it. But I happened to know that Startling Stories had asked Isaac to write a short novel for them and then, when he did, rejected it. When I told him what I had in mind, he dragged it out of the dead file and handed it to me. “Fred,” he said, “this is my only copy. Be very careful of it, because if it gets lost, you are no longer my agent.”

That pulled my cork. I think it was the only time in my life that I was really mad at Isaac. I all but threw the manuscript back at him. “Isaac,” I said — well, I think yelled, “we’re talking about grown-up publishing here. You’re the author. You give me a manuscript, I try to get it turned into a book, but I’m not the one who provides the manuscript.” (There may have been a few expletives thrown in here and there.)

Anyway Isaac backed down, we were friends again, and Doubleday was glad to have the book. Isaac had called it “Grow Old Along With Me.” Walter Bradbury, the editor who wrote the contract, called it The Stars, Like Dust, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s still in print today.

If the established New York publishing houses were too proud to pick up reprints from the pulps, the fan-owned semi-pros who had started the whole thing weren’t. What I couldn’t sell to Doubleday or Simon & Schuster I mostly sold to them. Isaac’s robot stories, for instance, went to Martin Greenberg’s Gnome Press. When I handed the manuscript over to Marty, he said, “I don’t have to read this, I’ve already read them all. I’ll write a contract. But I need a title and there isn’t one on the script.”

He was right. No new title occurred to me, but I’d admired the title on an Eando Binder robot story — “I, Robot,” borrowed from the great Robert Graves novel, I, Claudius — and it wouldn’t matter what we put in the contract, because the title could always be changed and titles aren’t copyrightable anyway. So said the contract, and the Binder title just never got changed.

Funny story: Isaac had told me that “his” Three Laws of Robotics were actually given to him by John Campbell — Isaac had just tinkered with the wording. But when the movie people actually made a film called I, Robot, the story that was filmed had nothing to do with Isaac’s actual stories but was something written and published by another writer, and all they used of Isaac’s work was the title and the Three Laws. Neither of which had been his.

 
In 1948, Isaac got his Ph.D. It is the custom before that degree is granted for the candidate to appear before a sort of jury of people who already have the degree, who question him or her at depth about various details of the particular field of study involved. When Isaac went before the group for his orals, he expected they would make him sweat and they did.. Then, when he was just about ready to flee from the room, the most senior of his questioners said, “Now there is one subject we haven’t touched on, but it may be the most important of all. Mr. Asimov, what are the properties of the compound thiotimoline?”

And Isaac knew he had it made. As he had. Not only the degree, but also a job, teaching biochemistry at Boston University (not to be confused with the famous Catholic school, Boston College) and no one could take it away from him because he had been granted tenure. With his wife Gertrude — Gittel for short — and their two babies, he could now look forward to a comfortable and stress-free life in New England.

He was, however, not quite prepared for superstardom.

 
Final installments coming up when I write them.

 
Related posts:

• Isaac
• Isaac, Part 2
• Isaac, Part 3
• Isaac, Part 4
• Russians, Jews and Isaac

Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, from left, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1944.

The Asimov store and apartment were just off one corner of the immense Prospect Park, on Windsor Place. I lived, with my mother, on the opposite corner, on St. John’s Place near where Eastern Parkway runs into Grand Army Plaza. It was a neat neighborhood to live in, with not only the Park but the fine Brooklyn Museum just across the street. I spent a lot of time roaming the park, which is a beauty, sometimes with Cyril Kornbluth or some other Futurian, more often alone.

Sometimes I would find myself at Isaac’s end of the park, and if the hour was respectable (as sometimes it wasn’t, since several of us Futurians had devil-may-care attitudes about sleep, and in those years Prospect Park was never closed), we might walk the extra block or two to drop in on Isaac. (Two notes here in the interests of full disclosure. I did also have some thoughts of the free malted that Mrs. Asimov was likely to offer me. And I did sometimes suspect that Cyril’s interest involved Marcia, Isaac’s sister. But maybe I was wrong about that. I don’t think anything came of it.)

As his brother, Stanley, began to mature into the role of full participant of candy-store chores, Isaac’s responsibilities began to ease a little. That was a good thing, since he had a busy life. In addition to his interest in science fiction, he had taken on another challenge. His father had given him a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was a gift that might have perplexed some teenagers, but not Isaac. He knew what books were for, so he picked up Volume 1, turned to the beginning of the A’s and began to read. He told me it was his intention to read all the way to the end of the Z’s, but whether he made it all the way, I don’t know.

    Isaac Asimov, 1940.

Isaac and I were pretty much of the same age. (We couldn’t be sure just how close, because neither of his parents was sure when his birthday was — sometime in the fall to mid-winter of 1919–1920, while mine was November 26th.) When we were both seventeen, we both made a major change in our educational status. Isaac graduated from high school and began college (and kept on with schooling until he reached the Ph.D. — one of the only two Futurians to get that far, the other being Jack Robins). While I quit school entirely and never went back.

Around about then, both Isaac and I formed the habit of visiting science-fiction editors in their offices. Isaac concentrated on a single one, John Campbell, who had recently replaced F. Orlin Tremaine as editor of Astounding.

What Isaac did was write an actual story, leave it with Campbell and come back a month later to get the rejected manuscript (which he then mailed off to Amazing Stories, who bought it right away), along with a thirty-minute lecture on what Isaac did wrong and what he should have done right. So Isaac wrote a second story, trying to do it as Campbell had described. That got the same treatment; bounce with lecture from Campbell, acceptance by Amazing. And the third story was the charm. It was accepted by Campbell, as were scores of others over the next decades.

While I had followed a different course entirely, visiting nearly all the sf magazine editors there were — now a couple of dozen, as science fiction was having an unexpected boom. Nominally I was an agent offering them stories by my clients. I don’t think I made any actual sales, but when I confided to one of the new editors, a kind man named Robert Erisman, that I, too, would like to be an editor, he pointed me in the direction of Harry Steeger’s pulp chain Popular Publications, currently in the process of adding a number of new titles to their list.

I went there and offered my services to Steeger. Wonderfully, he took me on, allowing me to create two new science-fiction magazines, and suddenly Isaac had a new fallback market for the stories John Campbell didn’t want, and I had a prolific contributor.

 
That was quite a happy time for both of us, but what then came along was World War II.

That affected more people than just the two of us. Campbell suddenly discovered that editing the best science-fiction magazine in the world was no longer enough to satisfy him. Through friends, he found out that the Navy was willing to set up a small research facility at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to take on problems that the established teams weren’t handling, and set himself to help the war effort by recruiting people to staff it. Robert A. Heinlein was an easy choice: former Annapolis man himself, invalided out as a j.g. and desperate to get back into uniform. L. Sprague de Camp because he, too, couldn’t pass the physical for actual combat. Isaac was a natural. And there was also a good-looking female lieutenant better known by the name she acquired a few years later, Ginny Heinlein.

I’m not sure the team ever made much progress in their researches, but they did give it the old Navy try. Especially Isaac, who was yearning to find some kind of high-tech career to follow, since he had learned he was never going to be a doctor. No medical school would accept him, because there was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement to limit the number of Jewish doctors threatening to convert the whole practice of medicine into a Jewish specialty. So quotas had been established, and they were all filled.

 
(Many more parts to come.)

 
Related posts:

• Isaac
• Isaac, Part 3
• Isaac, Part 4
• Isaac, Part 5
• Russians, Jews and Isaac

    Isaac Asimov, ca. 1934.

The way I met Isaac Asimov was the way I met almost everybody else who became not only important to me as a teenager but a lifelong friend. Like every other kid in the world, I met a lot of other kids in those years from, say, 14 to 19 — in school, in the neighborhood, in the YCL, in the (don’t laugh) Olivet Presbyterian Church Thursday afternoon teenagers’ class, which I attended until I was 17. But those friends came and went and were gone, while many of the ones I met through fandom were friends all their lives — Isaac, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, Dick Wilson. In fact, there are one or two — Jack Robins, Dave Kyle — whom I still count as friends, seventy-odd years later, although none of us are very mobile these days and it’s been a while since we got together.

I digress. (In fact, you may have noticed, I do it often.) In those days, the thing was that we kids had been captured by science fiction. And when a burgeoning fandom gave us a chance to meet other captives, we signed up at once.

Like most of us in the New York area, Isaac’s first clue that there was a way to join others came from reading Hugo Gernsback’s magazine, Wonder Stories. In an effort to improve sales, Gernsback had started a correspondence club, the Science Fiction League, and allowed some members to charter local chapters. One, the Q (for Queens) SFL, was in the New York area and was the point of first contact for most of the area’s newbies because they’d read about it in the magazine.

So the QSFL was where Isaac first showed up, but we Futurians kept an eye on their new blood. Anyone who turned up with an interest in writing sf as well as reading it, we kidnapped; that was one of the reasons the QSFL’s heads, James Taurasi, Will Sykora and Sam Moskowitz, weren’t real fond of us. And Isaac made it clear that he was definitely going to become an sf professional writer, as soon as he figured out how.

 
At that time Isaac didn’t give many indications that he would achieve that ambition, much less that he would become I*S*A*A*C  A*S*I*M*O*V. He was, if anything, deferential. Isaac was born Russian-Jewish, brought to America as a small child when his father, who had immigrated early, was at last able to send for his family.

Many of the Futurians had already begun to write sf stories, showing the mss. to each other and talking about the stories’ successes (few) and flaws (many). One or two of us had actually made some tiny sales. (Including me. I had had a truly sappy poem published in Amazing Stories.) A few of us had begun teaming up as collaborators. Isaac yearned, but he had to miss most of that. His parents owned a candy store at the eastern edge of Prospect Park, and their children had to help with the work of running it. Isaac got to our meetings when he could, but seldom to the writing sessions.

 
Continue reading ‘Isaac
Part 1 of I don’t know how many’ »

L. Ron Hubbard, left, and John W. Campbell

As the 1940s mutated into the ’50s things changed.

All through World War II, and for some time after, Astounding had been king of the hill — eagerly read not just in America but also in England, where a young Arthur Clarke was getting around to mailing in his first story, “Rescue Party,” and in Germany, where in wartime days, Wernher von Braun had been able to get his treasured subscription copies only by means of a false name and a neutral mail drop in Sweden.

Around 1950, though, competitors began to appear — first The Magazine of Fantasy, a more literary take on the field, then Galaxy, a more relevant one, along with lesser titles from others. One might have thought that competition could awaken John’s competitive spirit. It didn’t seem to. He had gone through a period of looking for new editorial challenges before America got into the war, with such ventures as the fantasy magazine Unknown, then an attempt to remake Street & Smith’s hoary old aviation magazine, Air Trails, into a science-news magazine called Air Trails and Science Frontiers, neither of which survived very long.

Then for a time, he seemed adequately fulfilled by concentrating on his services to the war effort. (When the Stars and Stripes ran a piece on new rocket weapons one of the authorities they quoted was described as “John W. Campbell, Jr., physicist and war work consultant.” I sent the clip to John for his amusement, but he may not have been amused. He didn’t reply.)

But when the war was over and he was merely the editor of one really great science-fiction magazine again, he seemed to enter a new phase. That was as a believer in some weird and improbable kinds of — I don’t know what else to call it — magic.

 
A disclaimer. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t the only one to whom John talked non-stop about all the wonderful and clever things that had been accomplished by “us” — which I took to mean the presiding triumvirate who ran Dianetics/Scientology. That, as John described it to me, consisted of three more or less equal-ranked persons: L. Ron Hubbard, the almost forgotten skin doctor Joseph Winter, and John himself.

I believe that each of the three was considered by the other two to deserve the ranking because of services rendered; in Ron’s case inventing the subject matter; in John’s the fact that it could hardly ever have got off the ground without the mighty boost John gave it with his magazine.

And Joe Winter?. I don’t know the answer to that for sure. I didn’t know Winter well, only met him a few times, never talked with him or about him with either of the other two at any length. But he did have a legitimate M.D. and did wage a rather persistent, if quixotic (and markedly unsuccessful), campaign with the medical establishment to grant Dianetics and/or Scientology some respectful kind of recognition. So I think, with no more evidence than I’ve shown you, that what Winter represented to the other two was a touch of legitimacy.

And, yes, I wish I did know some other people who had heard as much of John’s proud progress reports whom I could ask what they thought of it all. But I don’t.

I’m pretty sure that John’s audience for that sort of conversation would have included just about everybody he saw. But I don’t know who all the others were, and rather few of them can be still alive.

 
Related posts:

• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Clayton Magazines
• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Street & Smith
• Astounding: The Campbell Years, Riding High