The Way the Future Blogs

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’ »

Swanson and the Brits

There is a story about H.N. Swanson making a phone call to a producer that goes like this:

H.N. Swanson

Swanie: “Sam?”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie?”

Swanie: “I’m taking over representation of your writer, Blodgett. You’ve been paying him $150 a week.”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie.”

Swanie: “You’ll have to raise him to $500. I don’t represent any $150 a week writers.”

Producer: “Yes, Swanie.”

True story? I don’t know. It could be. Swanie certainly had all the musculature to enforce his will on the biz. I don’t know how long Swanie had held the rights to some of the greatest properties of all time. I don’t know who his very earliest clients were — H.G. Wells, probably, Joseph Conrad, some Kipling, why not? — though I do refuse to believe in Beowulf. And what I especially don’t know and never did was what advantage Swanie saw for his own high-voltage agency coming to be known as the West Coast branch of mine. Of course the association wasn’t likely to make a lot of work for Swanie. At that point in the development of my agency the number of film sales had reached a grand total of zero.

But now everything was different. What I said to Swanie’s associate was, “I want Swanie to handle it.”

“All right,” she said, a little doubtfully, I thought. “I guess he’ll do that.”

And she told me that British Redifusion, the name of the people making the offer, was a London outfit that took TV channels from one place and transferred them to another. This, under the English licensing laws, gave them enough money in the bank to contemplate new careers as movie producers. So, contemplating the prospect of what an unplanned thousand dollars or two might mean to my own solvency, I went about my business.

That week my business included four or five stops on an abbreviated lecture tour to the Midwest and the Coast. I don’t remember what my first stop was — perhaps some management conference in Chicago — but when I got to my hotel, there was a message waiting:

Mr. Pohl —

Now that we have made contact we would prefer that future discussions take place between the two of us, rather than through a third party. As an evidence of good faith we are prepared to increase our offer to $10,000. Please let us have your acceptance by return.

When I called Swanie’s office the next morning, he wasn’t surprised that they would have preferred to dicker without him. “Wouldn’t you?” he asked. “Anyway, they’re up to $12,500.”

And when I checked into my Denver hotel, they were at $22,500, and at $27,500 in Seattle, and by the time I was home the price was up over $30,000, and British Redifusion was trying to beat some sense into me — “Swanie is going to ruin the whole thing for you, you know. We can just walk away.” — and failing to beat sense into me.

Even Arnold Perl was showing some concern: “You did say that the Kornbluth family had some money concerns. It could be quite a while before our negotiations began to reach this kind of number.”

And when I called Swanie the next day, he said, “They’re at $50,000. What do you want me to do?”

I said — or screamed — “I want you to deal with it! Take it, leave it, whatever. I want you to make the decision.”

“Well,” he said, “I am encountering some resistance. I could go for $100,000, but I think it’s better to take the $50,000.”

How much is the $50,000 of the 1950s?

It’s enough that my share paid for a convertible, our first color TV, a dining-room chandelier that my then-wife Carol had her heart set on, and a few other odds and ends. I should say that $50,000 then was worth at least a quarter of a million now, but for the Kornbluths, the story was somewhat different. That great loving Mom that is the state of New York makes sure that the needy among us is cared for by rigorous laws, especially if they are lawyers. Since Cyril had not planned on dying but had let himself go intestate, the New York government appointed a lawyer to protect his interests — by which I mean the lawyer’s interests. So the Kornbluth half was not quite as big as my half. . . .

And if I had it to do over again, I’m not sure how I would do it.

 
Related posts:
Me and the Biz
Me and the Biz, Part II

As we were departing our last Hawaiian port of call, the captain got on the horn with bad news. He said the part of the Pacific Ocean we were heading into, which was most of it, was poorly served with American TV. Therefore CNN and ESPN and all the other feeds that had supplied most of the channels in our stateroom TVs were now but a memory. They wouldn’t be back until just before we docked in San Diego at the end of the cruise, but he was happy to announce that we wouldn’t be totally deprived of a voice from home. The Fox channel (which reached the Earth’s surface not from a communications satellite, like everybody else, but through a navigation satellite, which covered everywhere) would be glad to serve us while the real news people were absent.

In the event, it wasn’t any worse than I had expected. It wasn’t any better, either. As a news source, Fox suffered from not offering very much of it, preferring to allocate its time slots to its right-wing pundits — Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich were among the ones they promised — for the purpose of explaining the true meaning of the news rather than delivering any. When big news stories broke, Fox did cover them, at least at first, on a reasonably factual basis: the crash landing of a bird-damaged jet in the Hudson River, the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the brief and not really explained in-and-out candidacy of Caroline Kennedy as appointee to Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat.

Each of these events Fox kept alive for days, perhaps so that they could explicate the moral lessons involved: the faith-based explanations for the survival of the jet’s occupants, the theory that, since she was a member of the evil Kennedy tribe, Caroline probably had a trunkful of sordid secrets a fitness hearing would expose to the world. And, in order to give Obama’s inaugural address a fair and impartial review, they engaged a person who truly did know something about inaugural addresses. He had written both of George W. Bush’s.

(Confession: I haven’t actually experienced seventeen full days of Foxiness. Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the sound down to zero, I would never have to hear the crazy-making utterances of Hannity, O’Reilly, et al anymore but could get a rough idea of what was going on in the world from the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which, relatively speaking, was only mildly toxic.)