The Way the Future Blogs

 
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’ »

Grandma Judy

In the 1970s, both Judy and I had become active in Canadian television, Judy as the person who handled Dr. Who for Ontario Television, me as a sort of all-purpose guest correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s coverage of the American space doings, ending with the CBC’s coverage of the rendezvous in orbit of the Soviet Soyuz spacecraft and the American Apollo.

Things reached a point with Judy where I could do something for her. The Ontario TV authorities were getting difficult. Dr. Who had been sold to them as science fiction under the general principle that science fiction was educational and therefore good for children to watch. Educational authorities, though, were up in arms to say that such claims were ridiculous. Dr. Who wasn’t science. It was silly garbage, and it should be off the air.

And what Judy wanted to know was, “Listen, Fred, you’re pretty good at that space-program science talk. If we gave you time, is there anything you could say that would make Dr. Who sound a little more sciency?”

I thought that was a pretty funny request. I had also, for some time, been spending a lot of my time defending sf in general as healthy for people to watch. True, Dr. Who was a pretty marginal case. But you could find scientific lessons in almost any fantasy story once you allowed quantum reality to be defined as scientific, and I wrote a number of comments-on-the-air for Judy’s shows, and the problem passed.

 
It wasn’t just the opportunities for working together that brought Judy and me together at last. Most of all it was our growing number of descendants. Our daughter Ann had gone and grown up, and she had married a Canadian named Walter Weary, with whom she had two children, Tobias, who is now an excellent chef, with children of his own, and Emily, the granddaughter who won the Hugo Award.

After that marriage tanked, Ann married Juan Miranda, an Argentinean immigrant to Canada who was a high-tech electronics engineer. The reason he left Argentina for Canada is that Argentina had fallen under the rule of the brutally murderous “colonels,” who formed the habit of picking up people who criticized them on the street, torturing them, then murdering them and burying them in unmarked graves so their families could not even have the satisfaction of being sure whether they were dead or alive. Juan himself had been picked up by the death squads. But it was just at the end of their power. Legitimate law officials were arresting them and releasing their prisoners. Whereupon Juan very sensibly decided to get the hell out of Argentina. (His elder brother was less lucky. He had been picked up a year or so earlier and was never seen again.)

Anyway, Juan Miranda was one of my favorite sons-in-law of all time. He was smart, he was funny, he was crazy about Ann, and with her help, he gave us two more grandkids, Julia and Daniel. Judy was fond of him, too. Every time I (or, more frequently, Carol and I) managed to get to Annie’s house to view our descendants, Judy did her best to get there too.

Judy and I had one trait that united us. At the time, she and I were both unregenerate heavy smokers. Nobody else in our families was. When we needed a fix, what we did was go out on the front porch, light up, and spend half an hour chatting about things in general. You know. Like old friends do.

 
Part of that ended when Annie’s last marriage ended, and she moved way to the Atlantic Maritime Provinces of Canada. Then Judy’s health began to fail. She got really sick. And then, in 1997, she died.

I am pleased that, at the end of the last time I saw her, she gave me a hug. Do you know that it’s possible to have happy endings, at least reasonably happy ones, in the real world, too?

 
Related posts:
Judith Merril, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

That last summer we spent in the big old house over the Ashokan Reservoir was when Judy wrote most of her novel. She was there, with our daughters, all summer long. She had invited some of her old friends to spend much of the summer with her — I believe Katherine MacLean was one of them but don’t remember who else — and Judy had easily volunteered them to help her keep an eye on the kids so Judy herself could work on her book. Then, on weekends when I was there, I took over for a lot of the (actually pretty easy) childcare. That was the way it was in the first part of the summer.

Then, as Judy was having difficulties with the book, she began taking a room at the foot of the hill as soon as I got there on a weekend to take over prime charge of our daughters and writing away over the Friday night and the Saturday night, until relieving me on Sunday. I had no objection to any of that. As her agent, I had got Judy a pretty good contract with Doubleday, then still an all-purpose publisher with a decent record of best-sellers. Her editor was Walter Bradbury, the managing editor of the line, a business contact who had become a friend, and Brad was good with reassuring and encouraging Judy as she needed it. All was well.

Well, almost all was well, though with the occasional cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. When finally Judy gave me the completed manuscript, Brad did that careful line-by-line reading and then conference with the writer that I have described elsewhere. I think that must have been a tough meeting, because Judy tried her best to keep her style intact. But they got through it all right, or almost. There was a problem. Judy used one word in a scene that Brad really hated. I think the word may have been “burbled,” as in, “‘that’s great,’ he burbled.”

Brad was an almost-always reasonable man, but on this question, I don’t really know why, he was almost as intractable as Judy was. When he came to me with the problem, since I was Judy’s agent, I could not believe the two of them were locking heads over something that trivial. So I made a rather sneaky and very, very bad suggestion. I said, “If I were you, I would give up on the argument, but then I would just make sure the word wasn’t in the final setting proofs. Then when the actual printed book was in her hands and she noticed the change, I would abase myself in apologies.”

This Brad actually did. He was too upright a man to be really sneaky, though, so he let Judy know. It wasn’t the end of the world, though it did lead to a lot of yelling. But we got past it.

In fact, for several years there, we got past just about everything. I was losing big chunks of money every month on the literary agency, but it hadn’t yet reached the catastrophe point, and I was enjoying the work. And Judy had her novel.

The title on the book was Shadow on the Hearth. It wasn’t exactly the kind of book people thought of when they said “science fiction,” though it was set in the (near) future. In it, Judy’s postulate was that nuclear war actually happened. New York City was atom-bombed, and Judy’s story was that of a family trapped there.

She did a good job of it, too. The reviews were mostly friendly, and very soon there was even talk about a movie. Not Hollywood millions, that is. The kind of movie they were talking about would be a made-for-TV job, but what was wrong with that? There would be a useful chunk of money, no matter what, and then if it actually did get made her audience would simply explode, no more tens of thousands, to suddenly tens of millions.

It all happened, too. The movie did get made, quite well. It was a success. It didn’t happen rapidly, because such things don’t. But it was a great success for Judy, and she blossomed.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:
Judith Merril, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Part 2 of my memories of Gene Roddenberry

  Gene Roddenberry

When the studio announced that Star Trek had been canceled after its second year, I took the news philosophically. I had more or less stopped watching it, and Gene Roddenberry had already taken me to previews of a couple of other science-fiction shows he was developing. (None of them actually did much.)

Gene, however, was not so easily defeated A few weeks after the announcement I got a letter from him asking if I would be willing to sign a letter asking the network to reverse itself and give Star Trek at least one more season to show its legs. Gene was not very specific about just what sort of letter it would be. I supposed it would be some sort of group letter signed by a bunch of old sf codgers. I had no objection to that, or indeed to any imaginable kind of letter he might have in mind. I could not think of any serious trouble such a thing might cause me, and I was quite willing to do Gene a favor.

I then forgot about it for a few weeks, until one day I got a letter from an eleven-year-old in some place like Albuquerque, New Mexico, and addressed to “Frederik Pohl, editor of Galaxy, If and Analog.” Its burden was a heartfelt plea for me to change my mind about canceling Star Trek and put it back on the air for at least one more year.

That was a rather puzzling letter. How did he get my home address? What made him believe I had anything to do with canceling the program? Most of all, what made anyone think that I was the editor of Analog, a post that had belonged to John Campbell since the Early Silurian?

It was not a great concern, though, and it had receded to the shadowy recesses of my consciousness when. A couple of days later I got a similar letter from a nine-year-old in a place like Freehold. New Jersey … and then more, many more, from youngsters all over the country, and all displaying the same errors concerning my control over Star Trek‘s fortunes and what magazines I happened to edit..

So I got in touch with Gene to ask, just as a matter of interest, what he knew about those letters.

I already had figured out the basic structure of what was going on. TV shows get a heavy dose of fan mail — in the case of Star Trek largely from young boys — and somebody connected with the show had saved all those return addresses on the envelopes and converted them into a mailing list. (I knew all about such lists. Dirk Wylie and I had got his literary agency started by mailing an invitation to a list of the same kind, although much smaller, this one taken from the return addresses on manuscripts submitted to Popular Publications’ pulp magazines.)

In his reply Gene admitted that they had written a letter to all those thousands of fans, suggesting they write letters to get the program extended — but phrased a little confusingly, which is no doubt how come so many of them thought I was the executioner. He hoped I wasn’t mad because, in the heat of the action, they had sent out the letter — bearing my signature — without showing it to me. I wasn’t mad, and wrote back to tell him so.
 

Bjo Trimble, in costume, with William Shatner
on the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, ca. 1979.

I wasn’t the only string to Gene’s bow. As I learned later, Harlan Ellison was trying to whip up pressure from the TV professionals, and Bjo Trimble and her husband were attempting to do the same among fan groups.

How well they did, I don’t know, but how well that letter under my name did was very. I have a statement from a person actually on the scene at the network that the executives were astonished and in no small degree worried at the volume and vigor of (correctly addressed) mail it produced.

And, in fact, the network did suddenly announce that they’d thought it over and, after all, they would let Star Trek stay on the air for one more season.

Related post:
Gene Roddenberry

“A kind of Wagon Train in space. . . .”

The Man Who Launched the Enterprise

      Majel Barrett and Gene Roddenberry.

I was pretty satisfied with Tricon, the Worldcon in Cleveland in 1966. When it was over, I had had a chance to hang with many old friends, I had had a few talks with writers I wanted to juice up for the magazines I was editing, Galaxy and If, and I had picked up another Hugo Award — this one a “Best Magazine” award for If. I was aware that there was a lot of stuff going on that I had missed — like the showing of the pilot episode of something called Star Trek — but I had received an information package about it from its producer, somebody named Gene Roddenberry, and he had described it as “a kind of Wagon Train in space.” That didn’t awaken in my soul any desire to see it.

True, Roddenberry himself sounded sort of interesting: A B-17 pilot with 89 missions in the South Pacific in World War II, later a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, who began writing TV scripts in his spare time. But by then I had had a fair number of dealings with TV people on my own, and they hadn’t impressed me with the breed. I wasn’t enough interested to offer to buy him a drink.

Then, in 1969, I won another Hugo for If and Star Trek won a Hugo of its own, and I got an idea. The most conspicuous thing about television was that their numbers were at least an order of magnitude larger than ours at the magazines. So why shouldn’t I try to get in on some of those large numbers, perhaps by obtaining the rights to publish an occasional story based on a Star Trek episode in one of my magazines? Would any of those numbers rub off on us?

I didn’t know that they would. On the other hand, I didn’t know that they wouldn’t. So I wrote Gene a letter, outlining what I had in mind and suggesting that he and I get together to talk it over. He responded at once with, “Sure, let’s.” And a week or two later, when I had been planning to be in L.A. for the purpose of urging some writers on anyway, I drove my rented convertible up to the gate at the Desilu lot, where Star Trek was filmed, and told the armed guard that I was here to see Mr. Roddenberry.

* * *

Gene turned out to be friendly, smart and obliging. He thought my plan could do nothing but good for both parties, and he thought it should be put into practice right away.

The only thing wrong with that plan, he told me, was that he didn’t have the authority to okay it. That belonged to the higher-ups in the company’s Byzantine Hollywood corporate structure. Star Trek didn’t own itself. It was owned by Paramount Pictures, which would have to approve the plan. Unfortunately, though, even Paramount’s approval didn’t mean I could start commissioning stories, because they, too, were owned, this time by the sprawling Gulf & Western, sometimes called Engulf & Destroy.

“So how long until we get a decision from Gulf and Western?” I asked, as politely as possible.

“Oh, you never know that,” Gene said. “Sometimes not too long. But anyway, as long as you’re here, I’ve got a photographer standing by. Mind if he takes a few pictures?”

I didn’t, and for a prop Gene picked his Hugo from the Worldcon off the shelf and we passed it back and forth for a dozen or so photographs — me awarding it to him for some, and then Gene awarding it to me (but with the lettering on the base carefully concealed) on the rest. And then I went on with the rest of my West Coast obligations.

Gene had invited me to try writing a script for the series. I did try, but without much luck. Perhaps the problem was that I didn’t really like the idea of another barrier between me and the audience — that is, a director and a bunch of actors — or perhaps I just wasn’t into network television, having already had my share of disillusioning experiences with it. Anyway, for some reason I just was no good at it. Still, that — and the hope that Engulf and Destroy might ultimately come up with the okay for us to do some of the stories — meant that I was in the habit of visiting Gene every time I hit L.A., which was always a pleasure. . . .

Well, almost always. There was the time when he invited me up to his home for lunch, high over Hollywood, where he lived with his wife, better known as Majel Barrett when she had appeared as Nurse Chapel in the series. It was a handsome house, with a grand view of the city spread out below. The furnishing was handsome, too, including the deep-pile, snow-white carpeting in the room we were in. Majel asked me whether I preferred white wine or red. I took the red. Then I almost immediately knocked the glass over, spilling the whole glass of that deep red wine onto the still deep-pile, but no longer snow-white, carpeting.

Majel was a sweet-tempered woman. The proof of that is that she didn’t snatch up one of the cheese knives and cut my throat on the spot.

I used to see Majel every once in a while at dinners of the local space society, where she was an honored guest. She spoke to me without rancor, which is proof, again, that she had totally forgiven me. (It is impossible that she simply forgot what I did to her beautiful white carpet.)

* * *

Star Trek had a good first year and a somewhat less good second year. For the third year it got canceled.

This sort of event is by no means unusual in the bloodthirsty world of network TV, but Gene wasn’t prepared to take it lying down. So he and some confederates concocted a plan to keep the show on the air for a while.

One of the confederates turned out to be me. To find out more about it, however, you’ll have to wait for the conclusion of this essay. That will be coming up in this blog before long, but not until I get around to writing it.

To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:
Raising Star Trek from the Dead

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’ »