The Way the Future Blogs

Part 2 of “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation,” recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Bester: It’s kind of peculiar, we are finally accepted — the Johnny-come-latelys are now talking about “sci-fi,” which is an abbreviation which I loathe. But what makes me very curious is what the hell people are looking for in science fiction. Predictions of the future, extrapolations of technology, that sort of thing?

I still think science fiction is the poetry of literature, and if you want new ideas and ways of telling a story and new kinds of stories, you go to science fiction, because God knows you can’t find it in ordinary commercial fiction today. Most of the hundreds of science fiction soft-cover books are old-style space opera nonsense to which we pay no attention.

If you want something arresting, read a novel by Fred Pohl, which yesterday won the most distinguished award that science fiction has to offer.

Pohl: The name of the book is Gateway and it won the heaviest damn award I’ve ever had to carry around. [Editor's note: It won the Campbell, Nebula and Locus Awards that year, and — two months later — the Hugo Award as well.]

Bester: Now tell them about the book, because you will be explaining to them, Fred, what I’m talking about, about the freshness of approach, freshness of ideas.

Pohl: The book concerns a man about 20, 50, 100 years from now whose name is Robinette Broadhead and who works in the food mines in Wyoming. Here they dig out the shale rock and squeeze out the oil, and grow single-cell protein on the oil (there’s a British Petroleum patent on this). He happens to hit lucky and get some money and pays his passage to an asteroid, somewhere out in space, called Gateway, where, half a million years ago, some wandering people, creatures, beings of another star left a lot of spaceships around. They still work. There is nobody there, there is no explanation of anything, but there are the spaceships. And if you get into them and push the right buttons they will take you anywhere in the galaxy.

The difficulty is that you don’t know where, because nobody knows how to read their inscriptions. And you don’t know if you will come back and you don’t know what you’ll find. So what you do is you get into it and you pray hard for a while and you push a button and by and by you do or do not emerge on another planet somewhere. And do or do not find something, some artifact, some mineral, some gem, whatever, that will make you rich forever. If you’re lucky you get back. If you’re very lucky you get back rich. Most people don’t get back or don’t find anything. And this is the central story of Gateway, which may or may not be flashingly original but I kind of enjoyed it.

At the same time, there’s a parallel story going chapter by chapter, which is the story of this man’s psychoanalysis. His shrink is a computer programmed to be a psychoanalyst, whose name is Sigfrid von Shrink. He’s my favorite character in the book. And there’s a dialogue between Broadhead and the computer that goes all the way through it.

I will reveal to you the depths of my vanity. I like the book a lot and I’m awfully pleased that it won. I worked hard on it over a long period of time. The thing about the book is, as Alfie said, I didn’t set out in my mind to construct this book.

I began writing different things and throwing half of them away and then writing sections and not being sure where they fitted in. And thinking more about the character and perceiving that these things must be true of him, I put them in. And thinking about what he would do and how he would feel, and changing the book because he developed a life of his own as he went along. Changing the book to make it conform to the realities of what I perceived of him, and after five or six years I had a stack of papers so high, which amounted to 50 or 100 little scenes that I knew contained within them, somewhere, a novel, if I could only find it.

Then — one of the side benefits that are sometimes given to science-fiction writers — I was lecturing on science fiction and they gave me a cruise to six ports in the Caribbean while I did it. And I had pieces of paper strewn all over my stateroom, trying to find out which went in front of which, and the steward kept wanting to come in and clean the room, and I kept saying “No, no, stay away, you’ll destroy seven years of work if you do.”

But I got it sorted out and pieced it together. It was a laborious way of writing a novel and usually I’m much more efficient and linear, but I’m pleased with the way it came out. I have no modesty in this matter.

Bester: Fred’s neglected to point out that he has extrapolated our great American disease, which is that success is the be-all and end-all of life and no matter what you do, if you end up rich and successful, it is worth any risk. This was the point that Fred made in the novel, and which is most pertinent — if anyone knows the career of Richard Nixon, for example.

But as for that tessellated quality of putting it together, this is the way I do it all the time. I put together these various pieces into a giant mosaic and I constantly have pieces of paper saying, “Now this doesn’t go before that, it goes after that.”

“Hey, lady,” I’ll say to my Redhead, “which do you think should go first?” I need to have outside opinions and stuff like that. As you say, it isn’t linear; but I think it develops as we become more mature as writers. We no longer work in the linear style because life is no longer linear.

Pohl: As you said before, we both grew up through the pulps. I don’t know exactly when I became a professional writer, because my first sale was a poem. I wrote it when I was 15, and it was accepted when I was 16 and published when I was 17 and paid for when I was 18. Somewhere in there I became a professional writer, and I’ve been pounding away at the same typewriter keys ever since.

When I first began writing seriously, I carefully schooled myself to put a sheet of white paper, a carbon sheet and a second sheet into the typewriter, type my name and address, begin writing, and when I’d finished I took it all out, put it in an envelope and mailed it to someone, and sometimes they bought it and sometimes not — but enough to keep me going. And I did that for about 10 years, and at the end of those 10 years I realized that I had published 40 or 50 stories and had managed to eat fairly well, at least part of the time. But I had not yet published anything that I was proud of.

I had schooled myself to write linearly and rapidly from the beginning to the end, making it up as I went along, never looking back and never changing. It’s like instant lightning sketches at a beach resort, you can do them fast, you can do them sure, but you can’t do them good. So I decided to trick myself, and ever since then, which is now 30 years of writing, I’ve always done my first drafts on the back of old correspondence and circulars — so there is no way I could submit them that way. So I’ve got to retype them and therefore I make myself rewrite every word before I send them out. And the disease is getting pretty terminal, because now I rewrite four times, five times, six times before it goes out.

Bester: I do that all the time, Fred. I start in longhand — I work in legal pads in longhand.

But I’ve got a story to back you up on what you just said. After five or 10 years of scriptwriting — and I was carrying two or three shows a week at the time — it seemed to me that I was getting very old and very slow. I couldn’t write as many scripts as I had before.

Continue reading ‘Me and Alfie, Part 2: Gateway and the Art of Writing’ »

 
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’ »

Alfred Bester

When the Air Force decided they wouldn’t need my services in order to accomplish the defeat of Japan — the reason for that being that Japan, discouraged by the simultaneous American atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Stalin’s last-minute invasion of their northern front, had finally given its struggle in World War II and surrendered — they sent me home to New York City. There I rented an apartment in Greenwich Village and, for reasons connected with a book I was trying to write, went looking for a job in the advertising business.

I answered three help-wanted ads in the Sunday Times employment section. One of them, a small Madison Avenue advertising agency, Thwing & Altman, took me on as a copywriter.

It didn’t pay as well as I had thought a Mad Ave. advertising job would, but otherwise it was a likable enough job. Its good features included location. Within the perimeter of a circle with a ten-block radius there were literally hundreds of quite good restaurants where I could get a lunch of almost any school and ethnicity. I quickly learned that, even with all that variety available, there were a handful that I kept returning to, and one of those was in the lobby of the Columbia radio (not yet TV) network’s then New York headquarters, the present skyscraper not yet having been built. The restaurant was frequently used by people from the network, and one of the reasons I liked it was that every once in a while I would run into Alfie Bester, also looking to grab a lunch there, and we would have a nice meal together, spiced with shop talk.

 
The thing to remember about the career of Alfred J. Bester is that he was first and foremost a money writer. He had the talent to do that well. He could write almost anything — science-fiction stories, comics, radio-serial scripts, you name it, and he could do them all at the top of his form — and what particular kind of thing he did write, depending on how the vagaries of the market fluctuated at any given moment, was whichever one of them was paying the most dollars per hour of punching typewriter keys.

Alfie had begun writing science fiction, back in the ’30s, because he had a number of friends — including Horace L. Gold and Mort Weisinger — who worked as editors at Standard Magazines, publishers of, among many other pulps, the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. They coached him in the writing of sf, and bought his practice stories. (Well, they didn’t buy all of them. A very few they rejected, and of those I bought one or two when, as a teenage editor, I was editing Astonishing and Super Science Stories).

Then Alfie discovered that comics were paying better than sf just then, so he tried his luck at comics, discovered that they were as easy to write as sf — for him — and switched his personal production line to comics.

Then he got a tip from his wife, Rolly, that changed everything.

Continue reading ‘Alfie’ »

I have one more little story that I want to tell you about our Custody Wars, and then we can leave that unpleasant subject forever. It concerns the way in which Judy was able to make people who should have been neutral declare loyalty to her.

I was working in my Fifth Avenue literary agency one day when the door opened and a man named Sam walked in. (His name wasn’t actually Sam, but I see no reason to tell you what his real name was, although there are quite a few people around who would have no trouble guessing it.) Sam said the reason he had come was that he had been working for the Scott Meredith agency, Scott had fired him and he needed a job. Would I like to hire him?

Such a thought had never occurred to me but, you know, it wasn’t a totally bad idea. To some extent the earnings of the agency depended on how much time I devoted to making sales. I didn’t trust anybody but myself with the major sales, but there were all those routine ones that required no more than putting a manuscript in an envelope with a friendly covering letter, and getting it onto the desk of somebody who might buy it.

I wasn’t deep in financial miseries yet, although I was beginning to get close, so I said, “All right, you’re hired for a trial month. Here’s a building pass and an office key, and come in tomorrow and start familiarizing yourself with the work.” Big executive, right? Shrewd judge of men. Quick to seize a random opportunity.

So the next day came along, and Sam began to familiarize himself with the locator cards, and which Western could go to, say, Mike Tilden’s Western pulps but by no means to those of the Thrilling group, and all that stuff. And then, just a few days later, one of my favorite writers came in, looking seriously annoyed. “Hey, Fred,” he said, “Horace bought that novelette of mine two weeks ago. Why haven’t you sent me a check?”

That was an unexpected embarrassing moment — truly unexpected and seriously embarrassingly embarrassing — and then there was another like it, and then I figured out what was going on. Sam, who is dead now, was using his office key to come back at night, after everyone else had gone home, and make a careful study of my deposit slips and check stubs. And then he passed it all to Judy. Who passed it on to my clients. With the result that now everybody knew as much as I did about my most private juggling of the funds that were keeping me going.

Was I pretty close to theft there? I was. The only thing that was different was that every last human being who had money coming was getting it in full, just a few days or weeks late. But no, I had no right to do it.

Just an overpowering need.

 
Of course I fired Sam five minutes after I found out what damage he had done, but of course the damage was already very serious. What Judy knew, if she chose to spread it, was enough to threaten the relation of trust I had with some of my favorite clients.

She did choose to do that, and it did have that effect, for a few clients. But it didn’t put me out of business.

And what about old Sam, here? How would you describe him? Stinking, treacherous, backbiting piece of human excrement? Something like that, maybe, or at least those were the kind of words that crossed my own mind.

But do you really think that that’s the way Sam thought of himself? No. I don’t think that for one second.

Remember what I said about Judy’s phenomenal ability to attract loyalty from others. I think he considered himself an indispensably good friend to someone who urgently needed his help in her righteous struggle with me. And that is why, for the purpose of these writings, his name will remain as just Sam.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:
Judith Merril, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 9

Admiral of the Little Wooden Navies and Dean of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute

L. Sprague de Camp, left, and Fletcher Pratt, 1941.

When I was eleven or twelve I uncritically, but obsessively, read every scrap of science fiction I could put my hands on. This primarily meant every back-number sf magazine I could buy for a nickel (as against the extortionate 25¢ cover price for current issues on a newsstand) in the second-hand magazine store. One of the first of those, I think, was an early Amazing Stories Quarterly, and its principal content was a novel called A Voice Across the Years.

It was, I must say now — though I didn’t realize it at the time — a quite undistinguished story, although an unusual one in two respects. In the story, a couple of human beings from Earth have somehow or other happened to land on a civilized planet far, far away, where they are welcomed by being given wardrobes of new clothing. The garments fit them perfectly, because each one was custom made by a machine that measured every part of them and then cut and stitched fabric to an exact fit.

I had not seen any such voluminous discussion of science-fictional tailoring, or indeed of any kind of haberdashery, in any other story, and I was fascinated. I am afraid that at the time I may have been suffering from the delusion that every marvelous invention I saw described in any story was probably going to become reality before long — after all, that’s what had happened with radio, the airplane, the submarine and many other marvels, hadn’t it? So I thought it likely that before long Macy’s would have these machines in their boys’ department to make my first machine-created pair of knickers. (Please remember that I was then maybe eleven years old.)

The other unusual thing about the story was its by-line. It was signed “by Fletcher Pratt and I.M. Stephens.” I had never seen a joint byline before. I had never heard of collaboration. Did it mean that two different people had somehow written a single story? And if so, how?

However they did it, it sounded sort of unpleasant to me — certainly not like anything I would ever want to do myself.

Continue reading ‘Fletcher Pratt’ »

I took the writers who had been getting $75 checks from Thrilling Wonder and worked with them to begin selling to Galaxy at twice the rate.

Let’s talk for a bit about my career as an agent.

Mark Rich has a lot to say about my failings, especially my financial woes, which were considerable. A J Budrys told a funny story about them in one of the last speeches he gave, at the Heinlein Centennial, a year or two before he died. He had discovered what a great agent I was, he said, when I sold John Campbell a story of A J’s that Campbell had turned down cold before A J became my client. And then when he got my check, it bounced.

Funny story? Sadly, also a true one.

But the interesting thing there is that A J didn’t quit the agency. He remained my client until the waters finally closed over my head. And almost all of my other clients, Isaac Asimov and Hal Clement and John Wyndham and Fritz Leiber and all the other household names and the lesser names that I was bringing along gave me an amazing amount of patience, and most of them didn’t want to give up until I did.

And, most interesting of all, most of them were my good friends for the rest of my life.

Do you wonder why?

I’ll tell you why. It was because I was a hell of a good agent.

First, I took the writers who had been getting $75 checks from Thrilling Wonder and worked with them to begin selling to Galaxy at twice the rate, and then I worked with the — magazine writers to turn them into book authors, and I kept looking for new and better markets they could sell to. A few I managed to get into television deals, even into syndicated newspaper cartoon strips. Some I managed to promote from the pulps to the slicks, at many times the rate.

In short, I did everything a good agent did for his clients. (I would like to say that, even today, not all agents are quite that good.) But I did something rather more than that.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made a good writer — almost any of my dozens of good writers — sometimes be productive and profitable and sometimes be unable to get anything written for days or weeks at a time. I tried several different ways of, first, encouraging the writers to write, and, second, to do so at the top of their form. I finally invented one that worked.

I made a promise to eight or ten of my best (but not always solvent) writers that any time they brought in a new story I would hand them a check for that much wordage.. My rate was low for these incentive checks, at a half cent a word, but then when the story actually sold to a publisher the writer would be credited at the publisher’s scale, not that of my advances.

As a result, if you look at the stories published in the last year or so of my agency’s existence you will find that there were a larger number than usual of really good stories by Budrys, James Blish, Damon Knight and a dozen or so other clients who took me up on that offer. It worked. It got the writers writing more, and sometimes better. It even increased my sales to those markets, a little. And if I were unfortunate enough to become an agent again, I would at once start up something like that for at least a few clients.

But it also represented one more outflow of capital, and there wasn’t enough capital left to flow. Most of my clients didn’t want to leave, but finally, I gave up and folded the agency, and started paying everybody back.

Interestingly, maybe I should say ironically, then two unexpected new lifesavers were thrown to me.

Continue reading ‘What My Clients Thought’ »