The Way the Future Blogs

Will Sykora, left, and Willy Ley at a meeting of the Queens Science Fiction League in 1948.

 
Introduction

This arrived without warning from my old friend Andrew Porter, once the editor and publisher of Algol/Science Fiction Chronicle, the only real competition Locus ever had. Andy didn’t say why he sent it, but I guess he just thought I would like to see it again — it’s a part of a chapter taken from a book of mine called The Early Pohl that I haven’t looked at in years. Well, I did get a kick out of some of it (although other parts did just repeat things I’ve written here and elsewhere). Considering how many said that you had enjoyed the chapter I inadvertently reprinted from The Way the Future Was, some of you might like this, too, so I’m going to take a chance and reprint this as well. (Having cut out much, though probably not all, of the stuff that already was in the earlier piece.)

The title of the piece is Andy’s. (It refers to the fact that if you wanted to start an sf club in New York in the ’30s, it helped to have a basement that you could hold the club’s meetings in.) It was also Andy’s decision to include a picture of Will Sykora and Willy Ley at the beginning, although only Sykora has anything at all to do with the piece, and then not much. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. As afterwords I’ll attach a little bit about who they are, and I’ll also tell you a funny, if a bit embarrassing to me, story about The Early Pohl, the book this piece came from.

 
BASEMENT AND EMPIRE
From the book The Early Pohl, copyright ©1976 by Frederik Pohl. (Abridged.)

In the winter of 1933, when I was just turned thirteen, I discovered three new truths.

The first truth was that the world was in a hell of a mess. The second was that I really was not going to spend my life being a chemical engineer, no matter what I had told my guidance counselor at Brooklyn Technical High School. And the third was that in my conversion to science fiction as a way of life I Was Not Alone.

All of these new discoveries were important to me, and in a way they were all related. I had just started the second semester of my freshman year at Brooklyn Tech. It was a cold, grimy winter in the deepest depths of the Great Depression. There was not much joy to be found. Men were selling apples in the streets. The unemployed stood in bread lines and prayed for snow — that meant there would be work shoveling it off the sidewalks. Roosevelt had just been elected President but hadn’t yet taken office — Inauguration Day, still geared to the stagecoach schedules of 1789, had not yet been moved up from March 4. Banks were going broke.

There was not much money around, but on the other hand you didn’t need a lot. Subway fare was a nickel. So was a hot dog at Nedick’s, which was enough for a schoolboy’s lunch. You could go to the movies for a dime or, sometimes, for a can of soup to be donated to the hungry.

Brooklyn Tech was an honor school, which is possibly why I decided to go to it in the first place. Like many of my colleagues, I regret to say that as a kid I was always something of an intellectual snob. (I do not wish to discuss what I am now.) Tech had been born in an ancient factory building, next to the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge in the grimiest part of Brooklyn’s industrial riverside district. It had outgrown that and was now spread around a clutch of decrepit ex-grammar schools in the same area. We commuted from building to building, class to class.

I found myself walking from my Mechanical Drawing class in P.S. No. 5 to my Forge and Foundry class in the main building in the company of a tall, skinny kid named Joseph Harold Dockweiler. Along about the third time we crossed Flatbush Avenue together I discovered that we had something of great urgency in common. He, too, was a Science-Fiction Fan, Third Degree. That is, he didn’t merely read the stuff, or even stop at collecting back issues and searching the secondhand bookstores for overlooked works. He, like me, had the firm intention of writing it someday.

Six or seven years later Joseph Harold Dockweiler renamed himself Dirk Wylie. Later still, he and I went partners in a literary agency and later, but tragically not very much later, he died, at the appalling age of twenty-eight, of the aftereffects of his service in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

Dirk was the first person I had found like myself. Having learned that we were not unique, we contemplated the possibility of finding still others who would be able and anxious to compare the merits of Amazing vs. Wonder Stories and discuss the galaxy-ranging glamour of E.E. Smith’s Skylark stories. In a word, we went looking for science-fiction fandom.

The bad part of that was that fandom did not yet quite exist.

The good part was that it was just about to be born, when Wonder Stories started a circulation-boosting correspondence club called the Science Fiction League. We joined instanter, and began attending club meetings as soon as a local chapter was formed, where we met others like ourselves.

 
More to come. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Basement and Empire, Part 2: Science Fiction Meetings
• Basement and Empire, Part 3: Lessons in SF
• Basement and Empire, Afterwords
• The Quadrumvirate
• Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 2: School Days
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 3: A Brooklyn Boyhood
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 4: New Deal, New Worlds
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 5: The Big League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 7: The Crusade

Some of you may remember that some time ago I warned you (twice, actually) that I couldn’t take on a correspondence or even answer letters because my right hand was basically paralyzed and that was the one I wrote with. Well, it’s still paralyzed. But I have learned some useful ways of getting around that, to some extent, so I’m going to try to respond to a few communications now.

As you know I’m a beginner at this blog racket. I don’t know whether it’s etiquette to use people’s actual names, so I’m going to play it safe this time and disguise them.

First a thank you to one I will call DB. I recently published a short essay on the impetus given to the growth of science-fiction fandom, but said I knew I had published it somewhere already but couldn’t remember where,

DB could. He wrote, “I can tell you where you published this. It’s the opening of the second chapter of The Way the Future Was.”

Well, so it was. That’s a little embarrassing — I didn’t think I was really losing my marbles quite that fast — but anyway thanks!

And happens I have some news about that. I’ve just signed contracts with Baen Books for the reissue of some chunks of my earlier writing in the electronic book format, including The Way the Future Was. Don’t yet know when they’ll be available, but when I do, you’ll see it here.

And since others commented that they enjoyed reading this sort of ancient history now and then we’ll go ahead and publish the rest of the chapter, shortly.

I was tickled by the comments on my story about finally being granted a high-school diploma, seventy-odd years after becoming a dropout. A bunch of old buddies got off their duffs long enough to write things like: “Mazel tov. Now you can make something of yourself,” and, “A person of your intelligence should go on to higher education. By choosing the right major you can expect a good job when you graduate.” Etc.

How disrespectful these people are of their elders. But I love them anyway.

There were almost as many comments on my two postings about L. Ron Hubbard, A couple of them were quite unhappy with me, for example a woman who wrote: “I have been a subscriber.. Now I will unsubscribe.”

I’m truly sorry about that. I’m not trying to make anyone unhappy, so perhaps I should try to spell out what I do try to do.

When I talked about the Scientologists I mentioned that I knew there were reports of terrible things they are said to have done. I didn’t repeat any of the stories because I had no personal knowledge of how accurate they were, and they didn’t need to be reported as some kind of a public service since they were already widely published.

As we get on in the histories of John Campbell and his involvement with Scientology, etc., there will be some reports I will make about events concerning them. I won’t, however, print any unless I myself know them to be true or, alternatively, I have been told about them by people I trust who were on the scene. And if the latter, I will always tell you who my informants were.

Looking at this from the other side: When I wrote about the Writers (and Artists) of the Future contests, I’m sure the heads of that enterprise would have preferred that I be a little less candid about a few parts of it. But I was urging beginning writers to take advantage of it, and I couldn’t fail to mention what I thought were its (relatively few) drawbacks. So candor won.

Candor will generally win in whatever I write. I won’t publish scandal just for scandalousness’ sake, but I’ll try to tell the simple facts except when (rarely) they might cause more pain than benefit. That won’t be a big problem. Most of the sf people I know, which is way the largest fraction of recent generations of them, are basically quite decent folk.

Including a little story about Bob Heinlein

Moorea. Photo by Duncan Rawlinson.

All right, you’ve pulled out a map and you know from the long/lat that we’re now leaving Tahiti and heading for the island of Moorea, just across the channel. But did you know what Moorea meant to Ginny Heinlein?

First, I wish to put on record that Moorea is my third-favorite island in the world. (First and second places are taken by Manhattan and England.) What it meant to me when I first got there, 30-odd years ago, was Heaven.

I had taken myself there to spend a couple of blissfully warm weeks one miserable winter because I was feeling frazzled. Moorea totally unfrazzled me. Warm sun, crystalline lagoon, good French food and a little grass shack all my own, but with electricity and a civilized bathroom. I snorkled, I loafed, I let the frazzles melt away. By the time I got back to the airport in Papeete to begin the long trip home, I was at peace with the world — partly, I thought, because I had almost forgotten there was one. Not a living soul, for thousands of miles in any direction, knew my name, nor cared to.

That is when Hayford Peirce, an sf writer who lived in the islands, came galumphing across the airport toward me, crying, “Fred! Why weren’t you at Heinlein’s party last night?”

 
Well, the answer to that was simple, Robert and Ginny hadn’t known I was on the island because I hadn’t told anyone. Likewise, I had had no idea their cruise ship would be putting in at the port across the island from Tia Ora. I was sorry to have missed a good party, but these things happen. It then slipped my mind for some years.

Robert and Virginia Heinlein, Tahiti, 1980. Photo by Hayford Peirce.

Then Bob was to be awarded an honorary doctorate in Michigan, and Betty Anne and I grabbed a plane to cheer him on. (The photo of Bob and me in The Way the Future Was was taken there.) The Heinleins had chosen to stay at a hotel some distance from the proceedings; Betty Anne and I drove over to join them one evening and I happened to remember that missed connection on Moorea.

I got an immediate look of extreme displeasure from Ginny. “Don’t mention that place! It almost killed Robert. Remember that big, steep mountain in the middle of it? Well, we were walking around at the base of it and Robert wanted a good look at the peak. He tipped his head way back. It hurt. He had damaged his carotid artery, and I hope we never see the place again.”

 
Related posts:

• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2

What we’ve got here is actually an introduction, designed to give you some idea of what you’re likely to find in “The Way the Future Blogs” if you are staunch enough to stick around for a while.

The reason we need introducing is that I’m new to this, and so I may not get it right just at first. For instance, I understand that many blogs resemble back-and-forth chatting between the blogger and the bloggees, but that’s not what I have in mind. I am thinking of something more like a newspaper column, in which every now and then (at least once a week, maybe more often than that) I write a few hundred words and dispatch them to anybody who cares to tune in. Then again, most blog entries seem to be really short, maybe less than a hundred words. That I can’t promise to do. After a lifetime of getting paid by the word, I’m not so good at short. (But then you can skim if you want to. I do, quite a lot.)

So what will I be writing about?

Well, if you’ve ever read my experiment in autobiography, The Way the Future Was, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Very possibly you haven’t, since it’s been out of print for twenty-odd years (though I have to say that I am continually astonished by the number of battered and dog-eared copies that people produce for me to autograph every time I do a book signing.) So I’ll try to give you an idea.

Actually, the way this blog began was for two reasons. One was that one of my editors has been coaxing me to do something of the sort for publicity purposes, but the one that tipped the scales was that I’ve been for some time toying with the idea of publishing either an expanded and updated edition of that book or a sequel to it. A big part of this will be talk about sf writers I have known — as clients when I was a literary agent, as contributors when I was editing books or magazines, as collaborators, as traveling companions over a big part of the world — which is basically all of the writers anyone has ever heard of over the last many years. (For a sample of what I mean, see “Sir Arthur and I.”)

Now and then I might talk about any other subject that interests me. But there too if you aren’t interested you can skim. And in case you just wandered in on this chat and have never in your life heard of me, a condition which tragically is shared by a large fraction of the human race, I also attach a biographical sketch. (Which you can certainly skim or skip entirely. In fact, I recommend it.)

So let’s get on with it. I hope it’ll be fun!