The Way the Future Blogs

 
The Naming of Names

If what you’re writing is science fiction and the character you need a name for has three heads and seventeen eyes and lives on the ninth planet of Aldebaran, what writing secrets I am about to pass on to you won’t help you much. (Except that I will urge you to make it pronounceable. I still remember Doc Smith’s character Worsel the Velantian from my teen-age days, while cleverer names. but names composed entirely of consonants or musical notes that I encountered within the last few months are gone.)

But if it’s a human being you need to christen, I do have a few suggestions to offer. Suggestion Number One is: Know where your name comes from. Don’t just take some name that’s been inhabiting your subconscious for the past year or so. I speak on this subject with authority because I did that one wrong, many years ago;

The story I wanted to write involved a takeoff on Maxwell’s demon, a nonexistent little creature that illustrated some problems in quantum mechanics. For a title for my story, I wanted a human name that was racially inoffensive, easily pronounceable and, if possible, amusing. The subconscious quickly produced “Wapshot,” and my story was quickly published as “Wapshot’s Demon.”

It was only after the story was well and truly out before the world that I began to wonder whether John Cheever, author of The Wapshot Chronicle, the successful novel based on his New Yorker stories, was going to be unhappy with me. He never said anything about it, but for some time I expected a wrathful letter.

So there, for your edification, is an example of what you shouldn’t do. Don’t take some other writer’s presumably invented name to use in your story.

Now, how do you avoid it? Easy. Collect the obituary pages from your local newspaper. Dead people have no civil rights, not even in England where the laws are all in favor of the person libeled. Foreign-language papers are particularly useful for ethnic names, whether obtained in the U.S. or wherever your wanderings take you. (And, just to make sure, I generally pick a first name from one dearly beloved and a family name from another.)

However, use reasonable care. If the person who just won a judgment for $100,000 against you because he tripped on your sidewalk is named Jim Jumpup and in the same day’s paper you find obits for James Black and William Jumpup, and you choose to invent a loathsome drug peddler in your next story named, wait for it, Jim Jumpup, the judge is unlikely to believe that you did not intend it personally.

 
Related posts:
Fred’s Distilled Writing Wisdom, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

    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’ »

Doc and Jeanie Smith, 1958.

When I first began obsessively reading science fiction, at about the age of ten, all sf writers were as gods to me. Some, however, were bigger gods than others, my holiest trinity being Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells and Edward Elmer Smith, Ph. D. — with Doc Smith at the top of the heap because he was the one who wrote the Skylark novels.

In those days, I couldn’t afford the exorbitant cover price of an sf magazine, which could run as much as 25¢ apiece. I got my fixes in a second-hand magazine store. These were Depression days, remember, and there were second-hand everything stores all over the place. There the magazines might sell for a dime, and the storekeeper would buy them back from you for a nickel when you were through if you liked. (But what fan would sell off parts of his collection?) The trouble with getting your magazines that way was that you spotted issues you hadn’t read in no particular order in the bins, which was an annoyance when you were reading serials.

And serials were what Doc Smith was good at. First there was the Skylark trilogy, then the Lensman novels. Every couple of years, Doc would give us another masterpiece of interstellar adventure, with heroes in vast machines going even vaster distances to find bizarre aliens — to befriend or, if they were evil, to triumph over. Does that sound at all recognizable? You bet it does, because it was in the fertile mind of Doc Smith that the very first space opera was born, and every episode of Star Trek, Star Wars and a host of others owe him a debt they can never repay.
 

Doc first wrote The Skylark of Space as early as the teens of the young 20th century, just for the fun of it. He did try it on a publisher or two, who had no interest in this weird tale — perhaps, his bride, Jeanie, conjectured, because the story was all big machines and strong, single men with little human interest. Doc conceded the possibility but disqualified himself from trying to repair the gap.

However, there was that nice Mrs. Garby down the street. When approached, she agreed to write the necessary pages of romantic chat between the fictional inventor of atomic energy, space travel and much else, Richard Ballinger Seaton, and his beloved longtime fiancée, Dorothy Vaneman. Doc inserted her episodes of love stuff where appropriate, and that is why the appropriate byline for The Skylark of Space is “by Edward E. Smith, Ph. D., and Lee Hawkins Garby.” (In the later books Doc plucked up his courage and wrote the boy-girl material himself. I can’t tell the difference.) But, alas, even with human interest no one seemed to want it, so Doc retired it to a bottom desk drawer. There it stayed, almost forgotten, for years. . . .

Until, one day, Doc stopped by the general store to pick up some necessities. He noticed a new magazine called Amazing Stories. On inspection, it appeared to be publishing stories about the future. He hastily exhumed the rejected story and sent it off to them, they bought it at once … and a new kind of fiction was born.

Over the years, many another sf writer tried to copy Doc’s style of celebration of not-yet-existent science and super-technology. None really succeeded, perhaps because they were not naïve enough to believe in the stories they were writing. John Campbell, in the years before he turned to editing Astounding/Analog, perhaps came closest, though his attempts, like Doc’s, didn’t seem to concern real, live people. Perhaps what he needed was his own Mrs. Garby.

Of course, the simple concept of Mankind’s vast super-weapons duking it out with other, alien super-weapons all by itself was easier to borrow and there’s plenty of that still around. Fortunately for all of us, because if we didn’t have that what would we watch on television?
 

Doc’s doctorate was in chemistry. His particular specialty was in food chemistry, with particular attention to the chemistry of the doughnut, but wheaten edibles of all kinds were within his purview.

I know this because Doc’s wonderful daughter, Verna Smith Trestrail, with her nearly as wonderful husband, Albert, became good friends with Betty Anne and me. How good? Well, when the Trestrails complained that we always stayed at a Holiday Inn instead of at their house when we drove to central Indiana for our once-a-summer visit with them, and we said it was because the Holiday Inn had a pool, what did they do? Why, they put in a pool for the next summer.

Albert’s special claim to our affection came in several parts. One was that he had built in his basement the finest privately owned model railroad layout I have ever seen, complete with a lake, a steel mill and tracks for four or five trains at a time. Another was his history. He and Verna had met when he was her high-school teacher. Albert was very proper with his student, but as soon as Verna was 18, he swept her off her feet and married her before she could get away. Not that either of them ever regretted it. They had as perfect a marriage as any couple I have ever known until Verna died and Albert followed.

Verna looked like any pretty, middle-aged — and empty-headed — Hoosier housewife until you found out that she had a towering measured IQ, higher than either my own or Isaac Asimov’s. Quite a few of the highest-IQ people I’ve known (no, not Isaac. Or, for that matter, me) have been somewhat quirky or stand-offish, but Verna was as sweet as apple butter. She was also a great cook and, as mentioned, owned a stock of her father the baking and frying chemist’s personal recipes. Perhaps formulae would be a better term, because they not only specified what kind of wheat to use and how to grind the flour, but even at what time of year the crop should have been planted. And when Verna made his flapjacks for us, they were worth the trouble.

 
Doc retired not long after World War II. The kids were grown, and Doc and Jeanie moved to Florida, where they took up residence in a double-width trailer, in a park near Tampa. They actually lived in that trailer only nine months of the year. When Florida began to warm up for summer the two of them would transfer to their other trailer, slimmer and more roadable, and drive clear across the country to their summer stamping grounds on the Oregon coast.

Around that time, local science-fiction cons began to spring up all over the place. Doc discovered that he enjoyed them. So did I. We met pretty often at one or another of them, and we became friends.

Although the super-high-tech, atomic-powered spacecraft that Doc wrote about were the size of ocean liners and flitted from one star system to another at considerable multiples of the speed of light, their creator was modest in his modes of travel. A light pickup truck was good enough for the Smiths.

When, having been invited to the Cape to watch the launch of America’s mightiest space rocket, the Saturn 5, I decided to make a detour on the other side of the Florida peninsula for a visit with the Smiths, I was sure Doc would want to hear all about what the space agency was planning for this new titan. He did, and that gave me an idea. My invitation included a guest if I chose to bring one, so why shouldn’t that one be Doc Smith? I mentioned to him that it was only a short hop from Tampa to Orlando; he could share my hotel room that night and see the launch in the morning.

But Doc looked startled at that idea, then firmly negative. Jeanie didn’t like the idea of him going up in airplanes, and, no, he had never flown in one

Reluctantly I gave up the idea, but it would have been fun.

(End of Part One. Part Two will follow as soon as I write it.)

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.