The Way the Future Blogs

John W. Campbell in 1957
(via efanzines.com)
 

The home base of Street & Smith at the time that John Campbell came aboard to edit Astounding was a remarkably rickety old building at the corner of 17th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York. Well, that’s not strictly true. It wasn’t one old building. It was several of them, stitched together by knocking through walls and rerouting hallways to connect them.

This imposed a class system for getting into the offices. When John arrived for work each morning, he had to enter through the doorway on West 17th Street, because that was where the time clock was. (Yes, John Campbell had to punch in and out on a time clock, at least in the early days.)

Whereas when someone more important, like me, wanted to visit John in his office, we entered through the main door at 79 Seventh Avenue, like gentry. After telling the receptionist what we wanted, and providing we passed inspection, she summoned a guide to convoy us, through passages lined with thousand-pound rolls of pulp paper for the presses on the ground floor, to the ancientest and most decrepit elevator in the city of New York. Its controls were not push buttons, as we degenerate moderns suppose that every proper elevator’s are. They were not even the up or down handles that our parents remember from their youth. A rope dangled from rooftop to bottom of the elevator shaft, and if you wanted to make the Street & Smith elevator go down you caught the rope and pulled it downward, for up you pulled it upward, and the elevator stopped when you gave a little reverse tug on the rope.

That wasn’t the end of your journey. When you got to the right floor, you still had a country mile to hike before you got to John’s modest office. We were no longer in the original Seventh Avenue building — though we might as well have been when the presses began to roll and all the linked buildings began to shake. Then, at long last, we’re there … and John Campbell puts down the DeVilbiss with which he’s been spraying his throat.

“Good morning, Pohl,” he says — we knew each other for ten years before he ever addressed me as Fred — “Do you know why television can never replace radio in the American home?” And I knew that all was well with the world and John Campbell had begun work on his next month’s editorial.
 

That was one of the things I learned from John Campbell. He began each new month with some such polemical statement, trying it on everyone who came into the office. We were all encouraged to disagree with it, which meant that by the end of the month John had heard just about every disagreement that could be registered against his thesis, and had had time to think of rebuttals … so that he was ready to write his next editorial. (In which he proved that TV could never replace radio in the home because TV required attentive watching. Therefore housewives couldn’t turn it on just for company as they could radio.)

In John’s office, he sat at a rolltop desk. Why such an old-fashioned piece of furniture? I once asked him. “Because,” he said, poking a Camel into his long cigarette holder and lighting up, “these buildings are firetraps and smoking in them is against the law. So when the fire inspectors come by the switchboard girl gives everybody a special ring. We put our cigarettes out in the ashtrays and put them inside the desk with the top rolled down, and open the windows. Then we just wait for the inspectors to go away again.”

John was not alone in the room. He shared it with Catherine Tarrant, listed on the masthead as “Ass. Editor” until I pointed out to John that that might lead to unintended readings. Kay Tarrant had come with the job. Her official description was secretary-assistant, but as John preferred to do most of his own typing she spent most of her time copy-editing the manuscripts he bought (and those bought by his successor, Ben Bova, as well) to prepare them for the printer.

That was not necessarily an arduous job. John did not normally go in for the kind of lavishly creative editing that characterized, say, Horace Gold’s tenure at Galaxy (and infuriated so many of his contributors), and when John took a notion to rewrite sections of a particular story to make it more like John’s image of what it should have been, he did it himself.

But Kay Tarrant, too, had impulses that went beyond the simple correction of faulty grammar, spelling or punctuation. She hated — hated! — smut. And she devoted her life to erasing every trace of it from the magazine.

This, of course, had an effect on the corps of science-fiction writers, a sadly rowdy lot. The more troublesome ones initiated a contest to see who could get something bawdy past Kay Tarrant. Many of them tried. All saw their best inspirations slain on the copy desk until George O. Smith stepped up to the plate. He won when he got past Miss Tarrant’s eagle eye his definition of a tomcat as “a ball-bearing mousetrap.”
 

I can’t avoid a personal reminiscence here. When John left us and Ben Bova took over as editor of Astounding, the first story Ben bought was my “The Gold at the Starbow’s End.” As those who remember the story can attest, it is simply riddled with naughty words and impure thoughts — not because I can’t express myself without them but because there was no way to tell this particular story in their absence. (It’s a pretty good story, too. I think it’s my best novelette.) When he gave the ms. to Kay Tarrant for copyediting, he warned her that it would have to be edited with a very light hand.

All the same, he told me later, she got no more than about three lines into the first page before clearing her throat and saying, “Oh, Ben? Do you really want me to leave in this — ” “I do,” he said. “Leave it.” And three minutes later, when she cried, “Ben! Really!” it was, “Leave it again.”

Mine was the first example of what is loosely called adult prose that Ben bought but by no means the last, and ultimately Kay learned to live with the new rules and soldiered on.

 
More follows whenever I find time to write it.

 
Related posts:

• The Quadrumvirate
• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Clayton Magazines
• Astounding Years 30–37 BC: Street & Smith
• Astounding: The Campbell Years, Part 2

(*Before Campbell)

Astounding Stories, December 1933

The title of Astounding Stories was kept in its new, Street & Smith incarnation, the inaugural issue came out, and the new editor was named F. Orlin Tremaine.

Tremaine was not, of course, well-versed in science fiction. He was a Street & Smith veteran whom the management thought could do a creditable job of running a magazine in almost any field, even one unfamiliar to him. Tremaine thought so too, or at least thought that he could learn everything he needed to know about what sf readers wanted in a magazine from what the readers themselves had to say.

The primary source Tremaine had available for his instruction was fandom itself, now bigger and more active than ever before. All over the country, fans were organizing themselves into clubs, and almost every club began publishing its own fan mag (the coinage “fanzine” had not yet been invented). And what was in the fan mags? Almost always, there were critical discussions of almost every sf story published in any magazine. Tremaine studied these and kept in touch with some of their editors, thus greatly flattering those fan editors as he learned.

And Tremaine had one other resource for learning what fans wanted. That was — well — me.

You see, I had formed the habit of dropping by the offices of all the pro mags now and then to drop off manuscripts submitted for them. A few of them were written by me, others by fan friends and would-be writers, for whom I functioned as a literary agent, but that title didn’t begin to mean anything until some of us began to sell, quite a lot later on. At first Tremaine would send a (very) junior assistant out to the reception room to take the current collection from my hands, or, a little later, to return them as rejects, But then, once or twice, Tremaine himself began to come out and to chat with me for a few moments. And then — wonderful day! — he actually took me to lunch. I was then about sixteen. It was the most grown-up thing that had ever happened to me, and, oh!, how jealous all my fannish friends were when I told them about it

 
I don’t know if Tremaine had other secret agents at work in fandom to supply him with intelligence. I do know that he made good use of what he learned. He tumbled quickly to the fact that fans liked to believe that sf was in some way important and that you didn’t have to specify where in any story the importance lay. He used that wisdom to create a whole line of what he called “thought-variant” stories. He never said what thoughts they were meant to vary, nor was I ever able to deduce what unifying principle of thought-varying they were good for. No matter. The title sounded good and portentous, which I’m sure was what Tremaine was aiming at.

Tremaine’s Astounding was actually a better magazine than any of its competitors, at least (arguably) until Wonder mutated into Thrilling Wonder. What it didn’t do was produce a new group of major writers: L. Sprague de Camp and who else? In fact, the only other science-fiction writer I think of as a Tremaine discovery was called Warner Van Lorne, a name generally supposed to be a pseudonym hiding the identity of the real author, who perhaps was F. Orlin Tremaine himself. (Tremaine denied it.)

But then Tremaine returned to supervisory duties. Street & Smith cast about for a replacement to edit Astounding. They settled on an MIT dropout in his twenties. He had no editorial experience, but had written a few quite good stories of his own. His name was John W. Campbell, Jr., and he turned out to be the greatest editor sf has ever had.

 
Related post:

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

(*Before Campbell)

Astounding No. 1, January 1930

Astounding/Analog had two (or three) editors before John W. Campbell, Jr., came along with his magnolious “Golden Age” of people like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and all. However, none of those original editors were the ones that made the magazine great. That task was left for John Campbell, on his way to becoming what some authorities (ahem!) would call the greatest editor science fiction has ever had. (I’ll say more about that later.)

The original Astounding Stories of Super Science was the creation of a rather small New York pulp magazine publishing company called Clayton, which, sometime in the vertiginous year of 1929, elected to get bigger by adding some new titles. It was a reasonably intelligent decision, considering that they didn’t know what was going to happen to Wall Street that October, but it had one built-in flaw. It was only for eleven new titles. It should have been for twelve.

This requirement was an artifact of the way pulp magazines were printed. The text interiors were printed on the big black-and-white rotary presses on the cheapest available woodpulp paper. The covers, however, were printed in full color on glossy paper, and the most economical way to do that was to print them twelve at a time. If they were to proceed with only eleven titles it would mean leaving the twelfth space on the special paper empty and throwing away the part of that expensive paper not used.

Since printing a cover was a significant fraction of the cost of printing a pulp magazine it would be a pity to waste the cost of one. It made more sense simply to add a twelfth magazine. The question was, what kind of pulp should it be?

I don’t know who suggested that it be science fiction. Most authorities think it was Harry Bates, but I have a hunch that it might have been a man named Douglas Merriweather Dold. He is sometimes referred to in the old records as the editor of the new magazine but in fact was probably only an assistant, and was also the brother of the science-fiction cover artist (William) Elliott Dold. And I think that what Doug said was something like, “Tell you what we could do. We could put out a book” — all pulp editors of a certain vintage called their magazines books, perhaps because they wished they were— “of this scientifiction stuff that old Hugo Gernsback is doing. We could call it something like Astounding Stories of Super Science.”

And so they did, and so the new magazine came out into one of the worst years for publishing (or for almost anything else in the annals of American business.) in history It was the beginning of what they called the Great Depression.

 
In spite of the calamitous economic conditions, the new magazine survived. The actual editor was that same previously mentioned Harry Bates, who studied the stories in Gernsback’s magazines and the often better ones that from time to time appeared in all-fiction magazines like Argosy, and from them all derived an editorial policy that might have gone something like: “Action-adventure stories that simply could not happen here and now.”

That seemed to be a policy congenial for the writers. Ray Cummings, Murray Leinster, Lilith Lorraine and Captain S.P. Meek helped to fill the issues, and were generally happy to see some of their work in the new Astounding. One reason for that was the fact that all twelve of the new magazines had been planned in the prosperous and optimistic boom times of 1929 before the October crash. So as a matter of policy, the new magazines paid the writers not only well but, even more important, paid them promptly on acceptance.

Given a better economical climate, the Clayton Astounding might have endured a good deal longer, for it had some pretty good stories and even one or two that have to be called classics, like Farewell to the Master” (aka “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” by Harry Bates himself). Indeed, it was not, or at least it was not directly, the Great Depression that did it in, It was only that Clayton, foreseeing that some crippling charges would be coming due from their printer, sought to forestall them by the bizarre expedient of buying up the printing company first. It was a bold move. It didn’t work. It had required signing some notes, and when the notes came due, Clayton didn’t have the resources to meet them. Then they were out of business.

So for a bit, Astounding Stories — the trailing words “of Super Science” had been dropped after the first year — lay dormant. When Harry Bates discovered that there were enough stories in the inventory and enough printing materials, already bought and paid for, for one more issue, he promptly brought it out, dated March, 1933. Then nothing, until the larger — and solvent! — company of Street & Smith decided to buy it, and Astounding was reborn.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

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

Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey (Photo by David Dyer-Bennet)

Quite a few years ago —well, about seventy of them, to be exact —I was the teen-age editor of two professional science-fiction magazines for the giant pulp firm of Popular Publications. I didn’t pay much for the stories that went into my magazines but I did pay something, and so most of the science-fiction writers of that era dropped by from time to time to see if I would care to relieve them of some of their stack of Astounding rejects.

People like hoary old Ray Cummings and bright-minted new stars like L. Sprague de Camp came by my little office at the end of 42d Street, just where it stops dead at the East River, and one day our switchboard girl, Ethel Klock, informed me that I had a new visitor named Lester del Rey.

Though I’d never met the man, I knew the name; I had seen it, enviously, any number of times on the Astounding contents page. “Shoot him right in!” I commanded, hoping that he would come bearing manuscripts, and a couple of minutes later there he was, short, angel-faced, no more than a couple of years older than myself — and, yes, with two short-story manuscripts in his hands!

There is an established procedure for such events. It doesn’t allow the editor to snatch the typescripts from the author’s hands, or the author to throw them in from the doorway without a word. There has to be a little chatting back and forth first, so I had to wait until Lester was back in the elevator to start reading. The stories were short. I finished them both in a quarter of an hour.

Then I rejected them both.

What was wrong with them? I don’t remember. What were they about? I don’t remember that, either. And not only did I bounce them, so did every other editor Lester showed them to. Years later I asked him what had become of them. He said he had no idea, didn’t remember anything about them, and hoped I would never ask him such an embarrassing question again.

So that was my unpromising start to knowing Lester del Rey. Fortunately, later on things got better.

 
Later on things did, but it took a few years. John Campbell got over his nasty habit of rejecting any of Lester’s stories, so Lester had nothing to sell me; and then the Air Force invited me to join them for World War II so I had no magazine to buy them for, anyway. Then, postwar, Lester and I ran into each other now and then at various gatherings, and then in 1947 we ran into a big one. That was the ’47 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia.

We were both there. When it was over we were having a cup of coffee together somewhere when we got to thinking. We had had such a great time mingling again with our nearest and dearest (as well as some of our farthest and dislikedest) from the world of science fiction that we decided we really ought to organize some sort of local sf group so we could do more of it. So Lester commandeered a couple of his friends and brought them to my Greenwich Village apartment, where I had collected a few of mine, and we sat down and created the Hydra Club. (Why Hydra? Because there were nine of us there, and the mythological Hydra had had nine heads.)

This was a definite public service, because for years thereafter the Hydra Club had become the place where sf writers from out of town visited when they came to New York in order to find people they could talk to. (Out of town sometimes meant very out of town — in the case of Arthur Clarke or W. Olaf Stapledon, the United Kingdom; in the case of A. Bertram Chandler, from about as far away as you could get without leaving our planet entirely, namely Australia.)

Nor was Hydra merely a place where you could exchange trade gossip with colleagues. Lester and I both found wives there, and we two couples made a habit of going to cons together. What made that easy was that after a while Lester and Evelyn del Rey came out to visit with Carol and me and our growing number of children in our big old house in Red Bank, New Jersey. The del Reys’ intention was to spend a weekend. They wound up staying seventeen years — well, seventeen years in the neighborhood, anyway, since after a while they bought a house of their own down the street. It might have been longer, but one day, driving to a small vacation in Florida, their car got entangled in the wake of an eighteen-wheeler and was sent spinning off the road. Evelyn was thrown clear, but then the car rolled over on her and she was killed.

After that Lester could not stay in their house. He sold it for a pitiful amount —furniture, books, wine cellar and all — to the first person who thought to make him an offer, and moved back to the city.

 
For all those years we had been keeping busy, Lester writing, me doing some of that but also fooling around with editing and other diversions. After putting together a string of anthologies for Ian Ballantine, I wound up as editor of a couple of science-fiction magazines, Galaxy and If. It was not a well-paying job but I loved it. It gave some welcome perks, including a full-time assistant.

When I needed to hire a new one I interviewed a recent Barnard graduate named Judy-Lynn Benjamin, who seemed to be bright and energetic enough for the job, but presented two worrisome problems. One was that her specialty was the works of James Joyce and she knew nothing at all about science fiction. That, I figured, could be handled; I would not ask her to make any buy-or-bounce decisions, and everything else I could easily teach her.

The other struck me as tougher. Judy-Lynn was an achondroplastic dwarf, not much over three feet tall, and I didn’t know how she would manage to reach the top drawers of the filing cabinets. But I took a chance, and actually she worked out rather well, turning out to be capable of managing anything at all. After I left the magazines, Judy-Lynn went to work for Ballantine Books, winding up running the enterprise, which is why its current avatar, Del Rey Books, was named after her.

Lester entered the picture when my publisher, Bob Guinn, urged me to add a fantasy magazine to my group. I had nothing against fantasy, but I didn’t have a great deal of interest in it, and anyway I didn’t want to add to my work load. So I persuaded Lester, now a widower for some years, to come aboard as its editor. He did well, and the three of us got along well, too, in fact better than I realized until I got a phone call from Lester to say that he and Judy-Lynn were getting married, and would I care to be his best man?

I would. They did it. And after a while, he joined Judy-Lynn at Ballantine, and — no surprise to anyone who knew them — with Lester handling the fantasy side of the operation while Judy-Lynn continued with the sf, they were fabulously successful, leading the field in the number of their books that wound up on the New York Times bestseller list.

What made Judy-Lynn successful? The answer to that is simply that she worked with (and/or married) three of the best editors around, studied what they did attentively and learned from all of them. (I know that makes me sound immodest, but I learned from the best there was, namely J. W. Campbell.)

Lester had a whole other style. Lester took as his model some of the historically great editors of the past and, like them, questioned every phrase and comma in every manuscript he accepted and made the authors rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. It paid off — once when I was having lunch with Lester’s boss he told me that he believed Lester was the most profitable editor in the publishing industry — but it was arduous. Some authors dumped the man who had made them bestsellers in favor of some other editor who might give them a less stressful life.

So the del Reys were riding high, but it came to an end. One of the penalties of being an achondroplastic dwarf is the likelihood of a short life span. After some very good years, Judy-Lynn had a massive stroke and then died of it, and a few years later Lester followed her.

Other husband-wife editorial teams in science fiction and fantasy — Ian and Betty Ballantine, Donald and Elsie Wollheim — have done wonderfully well, but in making that Times list, no one has done better than the del Reys, and I don’t really think anyone ever will.

Donald Wollheim wasn’t satisfied with having his first story published in Wonder Stories. He wanted to be paid, too.

Hugo Gernsback wasn’t paying his writers. Johnny Michel had finally collected his five dollars, but not without endless annoyance, and Donald Wollheim had not been paid in full even then. They had come to the Brooklyn Science Fiction League to tell us their stories, and to seek vengeance.

All this inside information was revelatory to me. It was more exciting than anything that had happened to me before, at least since I discovered science fiction, maybe since I discovered sex. I don’t know what airy-fairy assumptions I had made about the mechanisms by which real authors supported themselves through their work. I suppose, if I thought at all, I guessed that once your work appeared in print, the government, or somebody, handed you a blank checkbook, which you filled out as you needed, or chose to want, their money.

Now that I have had some years of dealing with publishers on my own, and some of them even more reluctant than Hugo to cough up the scratch, I can see the picture in full holographic 3-D. Gernsback was not alone. Other publishers have been known to stiff their authors.

It is a matter of how much money is coming in, call it X, and how much is going out:Y. When X ≥ Y, all is serene. But when X < Y, then you have the problem of eleven holes in the dike and only ten fingers to plug them with. When you can’t pay all the bills, which bills do you pay? You placate the people who can hurt you the most. You pay your own salary, or at least enough to keep you going. You pay the printers, because if you don’t they won’t print your next issue, and then you’re out of business. You pay your paper supplier, because if you don’t he won’t give the printer any paper to print your next issue on. Out of what’s left you pay at least enough of your taxes, rent, and utilities to keep things from being turned off. And then you start to think about the writers.

All this is, of course, immoral. Without the writers none of the other things matter in the least. But it is the way it is, and one reason for it is that writers do not write only for money. They write to be published. All writers like to be paid for what they write, but few would stop writing just because the money was sparse or hard to collect. And those few are easily and instantly replaced out of the immense pool of millions, literally millions, of would-be writers who would sell their sisters to Buenos Aires for the chance to have one story published anywhere, paid for or not.

Of course, the stories written by the pros are probably likely to sell more copies for you than the cleaned-up salvage from the slush pile. But maybe you can’t afford to be choosy. If given the choice between publishing a magazine with so-so stories (but stories you can get) and a magazine made up of blank pages because the really good writers won’t give you any more credit, which would you do? You would probably hold your nose and publish. If you didn’t, your place, too, might well be taken by some would-be publisher ready to fill the vacuum.

Not all publishers think that way — in fact, let me put on the record right now that the business ethics in publishing seems to me a lot more praiseworthy than in most industries — but some do, even in the best of times. And in the Depression that was the Law of Nature, red in tooth and fang.

Clayton Magazines’ Astounding had paid its writers punctually and well. Clayton’s Astounding also had gone bust in 1933. Amazing and Wonder were a whole lot less benevolent, but they were still alive.

It’s interesting to try to calculate just how much money Gernsback traded the goodwill of his writers for. It probably was not very much — in the thousands, but probably not in the tens of thousands. But then there wasn’t all that much money around in the science-fiction field at that time. In the mid-’30s there were only three science-fiction magazines, often bimonthly.

I estimate that the total amount paid to writers by all three of them in an average year was not much over fifteen thousand dollars. All owing for pseudonyms, there may have been as many as fifty individuals selling stories to one or another of them in that period, and what they had to divide among themselves in return for feeding all us famished fans the fiction we lived on was something like six dollars per week per writer.

I could have made that calculation at the time, if I had wanted to. I didn’t want to. I didn’t care.

Listening to the wisdom that flowed from Johnny Michel and Don Wollheim was like standing on the mountain, staff in hand, while the Voice spoke from the burning bush. I could not believe I was so lucky, and I wanted to be part of it.

I came back from the meetings and reported all this Gospel to Dirk Wylie, who cursed his parents for settling in Queens Village, so far from Bay Ridge and the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, and worked out stratagems for making the next meetings with me. We came. We sat at the feet of the masters, in one soda fountain or another, while the ice cream melted in our sodas and our malteds went flat, and we resolved to be just like them.

And when it turned out that Johnny and Donald were inviting us to join a crusade to set these iniquities aright, we took it as not debatable that we should sign up at once. What Donald proposed was that all we SFL members should secede, start our own clubs, assert our independence of The Evil One, and let the world know him for what he was.

It sounded great. We thrilled to the idea of causing so much commotion and trouble for Gernsback that he would perforce reform. Or kill himself. Or be driven from the society of human beings — choice of any or all of the above — and so we entered into the great world of science-fiction feuds.

 
Related posts:

• 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!

The Depression had settled in, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated a week or two after Dirk Wylie and I met, and there was talk of a New Deal. Society seemed to be evolving into something new before our eyes.

So was science. We heard about things like relativity and the expanding universe — not just in the sf magazines, but even on the radio. The world seemed to be into science fiction almost as much as Dirk and I were, at least in a nuts-and-bolts way. Airplanes were almost common in the sky, whereas a few years earlier it had been reason enough for housewives to leave the dishes in the sink and run outside to gawk at a plane. There were dirigibles, and the new Empire State Building, almost a quarter mile of masonry stretching up to scrape the sky, was topped with a mooring mast for blimps (or for King Kong to cling to).

There was a kid in our classes at Brooklyn Tech who actually flew — yes, had a real pilot’s license, spun the prop, took off, landed, was full of stories about how you could walk into an unseen spinning propeller and be chopped into ground round before you knew it, about hairy landings in the fog and storms aloft. I had fantasies about getting a plane of my own, preferably one of the swallow-tailed or heart-shaped or magnetically driven jobs out of Wonder Stories, challenging my friend to a race and beating his ass off. I knew that that was fantasy. But what but fantasy was it that he was doing, every Saturday at Floyd Bennett Field?

In a way that had never happened before in the history of the human race, the world was looking into the future. Most especially Dirk and I. Most particularly through science fiction. When the Science Fiction League came along, we both sent our applications off at once, and almost by return mail I got a postcard from a man who identified himself as one George Gordon Clark. He was, he announced, Member 1 of the Science Fiction League. Not only that, he had been authorized to form Chapter 1; and I was invited to attend Meeting 1.

It was at night, and most of an hour away by subway, but I would not have missed it for rubies.

Related posts:

• The Quadrumvirate
• When I Graduated from High School (After 73 Years)
• 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 5: The Big League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 7: The Crusade

Hugo Gernsback

My ever-baffling computer pulled this out of some long-ago storage area, which was odd because it is obviously from a time long before I owned a computer. I have no idea who I wrote it for or where it was published, but when I read it over I thought it might be interesting enough to put in a 2009 blog. Tell me if you’d like to see more of this kind of thing, assuming I can find any.

Amazing No. 1

In the Beginning there was Hugo Gernsback, and he begat Amazing Stories.

In the fullness of time, about three years’ worth of it, a Depression smote the land, and Amazing was riven from him in a stock shuffle; whereupon he begat Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, looked upon them and found them incomplete, and joined them one unto the other to be one flesh, named Wonder Stories. And Hugo looked upon the sales figures of Wonder Stories and pondered mightily that they were so starved-ass rotten. Whereupon a Voice spake unto him, saying, “Hugo, nail those suckers down,” so that he begat the Science Fiction League, and thus was Fandom born.

If there had not been a Science Fiction League, it would have been necessary to invent one. The time was ripe. In the early ’30s, to be a science-fiction reader was a proud and lonely thing. There weren’t many of us, and we hadn’t found each other to talk to. A few activists had done their best to get something going, digging addresses out of the letter columns of the science-fiction magazines and starting tiny correspondence clubs, but the largest of them had maybe a dozen members, and for the rest of us we had the permanent consciousness of being alone in a hostile world. The hordes of the unblessed weren’t merely disinterested in science fiction, they ridiculed it.

From Gernsback’s point of view, what he had to sell was a commodity that a few people wanted very much indeed but most people wouldn’t accept if it were given away free. He couldn’t do a lot about recruiting new readers, but he was aware that there were a great many in-and-outers, people who would buy an issue of Wonder Stories now and then, and thus were obviously prime prospects, but had not formed the every-month addiction that he sought. Well, sir. The arithmetic of that situation was pretty easy to figure. If the seventy percent of his readers who averaged three issues a year could be persuaded to buy every issue, he would triple his sales. These were the visions of sugarplums that danced in Hugo Gernsback’s mind.

He had a special need to think of something, because by the early ’30s even the magazine industry was grinding down under the Depression. Even the science-fiction magazines. Three of them existed, but they were reducing their size, cutting their prices, dropping back from monthly to every-other-month publication; in 1933 Astounding went out of business entirely, and then for a brief little while there were only two. (A few months later Street & Smith bought the magazine from the wreckage of the Clayton group of pulps and started it up again.) What Hugo hoped for from the Science Fiction League was a plain buck-hustle, a way of keeping readers loyal.

What we fans hoped for from it was Paradise. As soon as the notice appeared, I rushed to join, but my membership number was 490, even so. I didn’t mind. I was thrilled to think that there were 489 others like me, when I had in my whole life seen only one or two. The announcement promised that chapters would be chartered in all major cities; club news would be published in every issue of the magazine, members would be encouraged to become each other’s pen pals — what fun!

Hugo promised that some of the members would be foreign — imagine discussing Spacehounds of IPC or The Man Who Awoke with someone who lived in England or Australia! Imagine joining a chapter, sitting in a room filled with people who knew what you meant when you used terms like “time machines” or “ray guns,” and didn’t laugh! Imagine just knowing people who did not think science fiction was junk.

But, you know, in all honesty, a lot of it was.

Continue reading ‘Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League’ »

One of the nice things about running a blog is that you can conveniently republish things that people have asked for. Another is that you can sometimes republish things that hardly anyone has ever requested … like this.

Among my childhood vices was the writing of poetry — sometimes quite quirky, like the first exemplar, sometimes pretty banal, like the second. (The best thing about the banal ones is that I quite often got some editor to buy them.)

I wrote “!” for the very first magazine I ever edited (and published, and ran off on the mimeograph machine, and bound), a tiny semi-fanzine called Mind of Man. It is also the very first thing I ever wrote that got favorable comments from people as astute as Cyril Kornbluth and James Blish, who memorized it and was known to recite it at parties.

              !

         ,   ,   &
        ! my frand
        ;  $
        - - . . . . . . . 

The second poem is significant even to me only because it is the first thing I wrote that some editor bought and published and paid cash to me for.

Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna

Darkness descends and the cluttering towers
Of cities and hamlets blink into light.
The harsh, brilliant glitter of day’s bustling hours
Gives place to the glowing effulgence of night.
The Moon, that pale creature, the queen of the sky,
Peeps wistfully down at the life forms below,
Thinking, perhaps, of the eons rolled by
Since life on her bosom lapsed under the snow.
A dead world and cold, this satellite bleak,
Whose craters and valleys are airless and dry.
No flicker of motion from deep pit to peak,
No living thing’s ego to shout, “I am I!”
But once, ages past, this grim tomb in space
Owned living things on its surface now bare
Till grim Time in his flight, speeding apace,
Swept life, motion, thought away, who can know where?

All right, all right, the Moon isn’t a planet and it never had any living things, or snow, either. Sue me. When I wrote it I was a fairly ignorant fifteen.

Then, when I was sixteen, the editor of Amazing Stories, T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph. D., accepted it, and when I was seventeen he published it in his October 1937 issue, and when I was 18 he paid for it. Two dollars.

 
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