The Way the Future Blogs

Dick Smith demonstrates a mimeograph. (Photo by Chaz Boston Baden.)

Publishing a fan mag in the 1930s was a low-skill, but not a no-skill job.

At the lowest level — that would be the carbon-copy magazine — it required no more competence than the ability to type a page of copy. The more sheets you could slip into your typewriter of copy paper, each with a sheet of carbon paper appended, the more copies you could make of your fan mag. The practical limit was seven or eight, and that only with the thinnest of copy paper and the cleanest of typewriter keys. (By “keys” I mean the part that hits the typewriter ribbon, not the keyboard keys that you press on with your fingertips.)

Dissidents in the Soviet Union in those years published their own sort of fan mags, only they weren’t criticizing sf magazines, they were criticizing their government, and if they got caught at it they faced, at least, jail, and possibly much worse. The examples of it I’ve seen were carbon-copied, because that’s all they had, and very nearly illegible. But they were passed around until they were worn out, or until the owners were caught.

There wasn’t much satisfaction in publishing a carbon-copy magazine. After you made a copy for yourself and a couple for your best friends there weren’t any left to send to Forrest J Ackerman and Don Wollheim and Jack Darrow and the other Big Name Fans you hoped would reciprocate by sending you theirs, so fans and fan groups with any funds at all would rise to the next level, the hectograph.

About the only people to use the hectograph other than fans were the chefs in small, often Italian, restaurants who wanted to announce the dishes they had on offer each day. The hectograph itself was a page-sized tray filled with jelly — usually purple — and not actually a very big step out of the poverty level because you couldn’t make much more than a couple dozen legible copies of each page.

The technology required you to type the copy you wanted to print on a sheet of specially treated paper (called by hectographers a “stencil,” though it properly wasn’t). To prepare for the printing operation, you first washed off the slab of jelly all the ink that was left on it from its last job, then allowed it to dry. Then you carefully spread the stencil over the surface of the jelly, pressing it gently to be sure of contact.

Then you removed the stencil and laid a sheet of paper where it was. Next, you hung that sheet to a cord you have stretched across the room to dry. Then you did the same with your next sheet of paper, continuing until the latest copy was getting too blurry to read. Then you washed the surface of the ink slab to remove every trace of the copy and typed a new copy, continuing until you ran out of copy paper or thought you had enough. You can usually identify a hectograph user by the fact that his fingers are almost always purple.

Then, when the jelly was good and dry, you washed off the old printing and start all over with a new page. You printed all the odd-numbered pages of your fan mag that way, hanging them all up to dry. Then you took them down and did the same thing on the other side for the even-numbered pages, and hung them up again.

When they were good and dry, they were ready to bind — which we will talk about after we describe a few more methods of printing, since the binding is pretty much the same for all of them. Such as the dominant form, used probably by more fans than all the others combined, the mimeograph.

Continue reading ‘How to Publish a Fanzine’ »

That headline, of course, is meant to be sarcastic. You see, we do have a problem. Our Ma Dell upright created it, all by itself, and all of the wizardry of our ordinarily undefeatable Guru, Dick Smith, has been unable to it restore it to civilized behavior. So please tell me (and Dick). Have you ever had this particular trouble with a computer? If so, what did you do about it?

First it goes on nicely writing down my well-chosen words. Then, when I switch to another file, it flashes a blood-red sign in my face that starts with the threats, saying something like, “You get out of this file or we’ll make you wish you had! This file is reserved for Frederik Pohl to work on, so you leave it at once. Exit this file now!”

Nothing as deranged as this has ever turned up on any of the four other computers in the house. Just on the one that I write blog material on, so tell me, please. Has anybody got any help for a seriously demented computer?

I’ve been nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo
(and I couldn’t be more pleased!)

Of course being nominated for a Hugo isn’t quite the same as winning one. This is a lesson I have been taught several times. All the same, it’s a nice feeling, and I appreciate it.

The blog team was absolutely right, too, in urging you to join the Worldcon, give them the $50 and get the sampler of Hugo nominees. It comes in electronic form instead of good old ink on paper, which I personally much prefer, but the price is right. All those great novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories would be many times more expensive if you paid retail, and you get samplings of all the other awardable categories, too.

* * *

As long as we’re talking I’ve got a couple of other things I meant to talk to you about. One is a really neat book that’s coming out next month from Tor. Its title is Gateways — note the plural s — it’s edited by my favorite anthology editor ever (that is, the one I’ve been married to for the last quarter-century, Elizabeth Anne Hull) and it came about when Betty Anne told our Tor editor, Jim Frenkel, that she would like to put together a festschrift anthology for my then upcoming 90th birthday, composed of new stories written by writers on whose careers I had had some significant effect, as editor, agent, collaborator or whatever.

When she made a list, Jim whistled and said, “That’s a list of most of the top writers in the field.” Not all of the writers were able to produce stories for her but most did, and it is my opinion that some of these are going to be showing up on awards voting this time next year.

She didn’t make the deadline for my birthday, though. I kept getting sick, and her efforts would be devoted to keeping me alive for a while. And then Betty herself fell in a bank parking lot and cracked a lumbar vertebra, resulting in pain, surgery and a lot of lost time. But now it will be in the stores before you know it, and I think you’ll like it.

* * *

Speaking of the ills the flesh is heir to—

A couple weeks ago, I had to get an adjustment in one of the contrivances that keep me more or less normal. We had just parked at the hospital where they do most of my repair work when another car pulled up beside us, and out of it came our production staff, comprising Leah A. Zeldes, our blogmeister, and her husband, Dick Smith, who makes sure we have enough bandwidth and keeps our computers functioning much of the time. (They are, by the way, pretty good fanzine Hugo candidates themselves, having been nominated for the award in three separate years for their handsome zine STET.)

I was out of there and back home in a couple of hours. Leah, not so much. She had a couple of days of being observed while the doctors figured out what she needed, then a spot of surgery, then bed rest for recuperation, and then, just to keep the doctors on their toes, a bit of pneumonia to round things off.

Now she’s back home recovering. But she still managed to get up a couple of posts from her hospital bed.

Blogging in our cabin aboard MS Ryndam.
Photo by Elizabeth Anne Hull.

So here I am, back home at last after visiting Kauai, Bora Bora, Tahiti and four or five others of the most beautiful tropical paradises God ever made — and now doggedly tunneling my way through mountains of letters, emails, contracts, phone messages and — what is most relevant here — comments from all you wonderful people who were kind enough to tune in on the beginnings of The Way the Future Blogs and drop us a line about it.

In regard to which there is something I must say. I care about you all — beloved grandkids, cherished old friends and just high-quality human beings in general — and wish it were possible for me to respond personally to each of you. Unfortunately, due to the useless condition of the witch’s claw that was once my sturdy right hand, it just isn’t. But please keep reading and letting us know what you think! (Did I mention that you did so in such unexpected volume that you burned up all our bandwidth and head blogmeister Dick had to run out and buy more?)

And what’s ahead? Oh, all kinds of stuff. In the universe of personal reminiscences of some of science-fiction’s giants, there are pieces on three of the field’s greatest married editor-publisher couples, Ian and Betty Ballantine first, because it is already on the computer, then Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey and Donald and Elsie Wollheim. Plus sketches on Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov and Cyril Kornbluth and some added material on Sir Arthur C. Clarke … and, of course, whatever other fancies happen to occur to me as I sit before the keyboard. See you then!

Which, as you know, is the largest island in the Marquesas group, and the one in whose harbor we are now anchored so that our shipmates may storm ashore in search of tapa cloth and guaranteed authentic ironwood carved war clubs.

Betty Anne and I, shipboard, 2009.

The other thing about Nuku Hiva is that it is the last dry land we are going to see until, after seven more days at sea, we dock once more in San Diego. This has certain consequences, among them the fact that something we do with our computers is incompatible with something the local comsats do up there in orbit. I won’t bore you by providing a more technical explanation of the problem (as if I could!), but what it means is that the posts I have been writing for transmission to our blogmeisters, Dick and Leah, aren’t going to get transmitted anywhere until we are back in our own home. And then they may not get to you in the proper order, as planned for your maximum reading enjoyment.

Ah, well. Sorry about that. I’ll try to do better. Meanwhile. . . .

I said in the beginning that I intended to provide reminiscences of some people who might interest you, and you might like to get an idea of who these people are. They appear to come in five categories: writers I have collaborated with to one degree or another (Williamson , Kornbluth, Asimov, Hubbard, etc.), writers who were my clients when I was a literary agent (Asimov, Budrys, Wyndham, etc.), writers I published when I was an editor (Asimov, Niven, Doc Smith, Heinlein, etc.), writers I hung around with a lot (Asimov, Silverberg, Ellison, etc. — you will note that some people come under more than one of these headings) and, the smallest of these categories, the nonwriters. This includes editors and publishers (the Ballantines, John Campbell, Horace Gold, etc.) and a few assorted scientists, politicians and other special cases (Carl Sagan, a local Democratic Party boss, a U.S. senator and so on).

Quite a few of these I have already written about in one form or another and those bits just need touchups to pass on to you, and so I will start them soon and keep them going as long as my right index finger permits. Along with whatever other kinds of comments I think you might be willing to sit still for. And I hope you’ll enjoy.