The Way the Future Blogs

I commissioned this illustration from Hannes Bok after seeing his work in 1939.

The Futurians had any number of members who won awards for writing, but we only had one who earned his Hugo by the beauty of the things he drew and painted. That was Wayne Woodard, as his parents called him when he was born in 1914, though he became better known to fans and to art-lovers all over the world by the name he chose for himself when he needed something to sign to his artwork, Hannes Bok.

Most magazine illustrators get their start with the magazines by visiting their offices, a bunch of samples under their arms, and showing them to whoever on the masthead would look at them until somebody showed up who liked the samples well enough to use a few in their magazines. That wasn’t possible for Hannes. He was a West Coast kid and he had no possibility of affording a bus ticket to where the magazines were. But he had a stroke of luck.

When he moved to Los Angeles — which he did early in 1939 — he met a kid fan named Raymond Bradbury — “Ray,” for short — who was almost as badly off as himself. The kid wasn’t aiming to be an artist; his dream was to become a writer, but he was as unsuccessful at it as Hannes was with his art. However. he belonged to a group of people who, like Hannes, were interested in science fiction and fantasy. The group, the Los Angeles Science Fiction League, would later become the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. They met in an upper room of a place called Clifton’s Cafeteria.

LASFS was a welcoming group for Hannes. Among the people he met there was a writer named Emil Petaja, who did get some of his stories published in the prozines and became Hannes’ best and lifelong friend. Another was a fan, or actually a kind of superfan who knew everybody involved in making of sf films, named Forrest J (No Period!) Ackerman.

The big news in science fiction, at least as far as the LASFS was concerned, was what was going to happen in New York that summer. The city was planning a huge show called the New York World’s Fair, and the fans in New York had uncharacteristically abandoned their blood feuding to work together to create a wonderful new project, a World Science Fiction Convention. It was the chance of a lifetime, they reasoned, because they could take advantage of all the foreigners who would come to New York for the Fair. Some fraction of them, they calculated, were sure to be fans who would be likely to stay for this Worldcon.

It was every last LASFS member’s dearest dream to be among them, but for most they knew it was only a dream. The Depression was dwindling fast, but its effects were not altogether over. And LASFS was made up mainly of teenagers with few resources to draw on.

But one resource was Forry Ackerman. A small inheritance had left him with money in the bank, so he was going to the Worldcon himself. So was a female fan named Myrtle R. Jones — or, as you would say it in Forry’s favorite second tongue, Esperanto, “Morojo.” And, when Forry had had a couple weeks of exposure to the woebegone expression on Ray’s face, he figured out a way of solving one problem. He could lend Ray Bradbury the bus fare. So he tapped the bank account a little harder, and pulled out enough cash to lend Ray Bradbury the price of a ticket to New York.

That was not a risk-free investment on Forry’s part, because the only source of income Ray had to pay him back was what he earned as a newsboy, selling papers on the streets of Los Angeles. But it wasn’t just a kindness to Ray. To Forry’s generosity, Ray added on a kindness of his own. He was going to do his best to meet every sf editor in the world, or at least every one who made it to the Worldcon, and while he was introducing them to himself there was no reason — assuming Hannes would lend him some samples to take along — why he couldn’t introduce them to the work of Hannes Bok at the same time.

 
And that is how it all fell out. Ray wheeled and dealt with such good effect at the Worldcon that, if I’m not mistaken, some of Hannes’ samples were actually bought and published by an editor, and several other editors asked him to do work for them.

One of this latter class was me. I met Ray Bradbury, and heard of Hannes Bok, for the first time at (or, more accurately, near — but that’s another story) the Worldcon, and shortly thereafter commissioned a set of illustrations for a story of my own from Hannes. (I still have one of the drawings on the wall of my office at home.)

That expedition worked so well for Hannes that it gave him the funds to make the move to New York, and that too worked pretty well. Well enough, at least, for Hannes to enjoy some years of relative affluence — affluence enough, that is, for him to pay the rent and have enough left over to eat regular meals.

I think he must have been a pleasant person to be around then. Unfortunately, I wasn’t around him for most of that period, because I had received an employment offer — the kind of an offer that you just can’t say no to — from the Armed Services of the United States of America.

 
Watch for Part 2, covering how all this worked out, coming soon — provided “soon” is when I write it.

 
Related post:

• Hannes Bok, Part 2

Cordwainer Smith, 1965.

“Scanners Live in Vain” was the first published work by the pseudonymous Cordwainer Smith, but not of the real person behind the pseudonym, Paul Linebarger. Linebarger had published numerous nonfiction works and three novels before writing “Scanners.”

Two of these, Ria and Carola, both published under the pen-name of Felix C. Forrest, were parts of a single extended story, told from the point of view of a central character who has the good fortune to just happen to be on the scene when and where all of the significant events of the mid-20th century are happening. This is a device several authors have employed when they wished to write a commentary on that period, and had elected to write in the form of fiction in the hope that doing so would get some intellectually lazier citizens to read it. (I don’t know how well the stratagem worked. Certainly I, as an omnivorous reader, had never heard of either book until Paul told me about them.) While not as attention-grabbing as the Cordwainer Smith stories, both of these were reasonably good, if not compelling, reads. (Paul had also published at least two other early books, a cloak-and-daggerish near-future story called Atomsk and a collection of poems, the title of which he may well have told me but I don’t remember, under yet a third and fourth pseudonym. But I haven’t read either of these. )

Since my own addiction to the use of pen-names was total for the first fifteen or so years of my professional writing career, I probably shouldn’t speculate about why other writers choose to hide under a nom d’escrit. But it happens I do know something in Paul’s psychic makeup which bears on that question.

Paul rarely came to New York, but my ramblings did occasionally take me to Washington, where he and his wife lived, in a nice house with a huge, red and gold congratulations-on-your-birth banner from no less than Sun Yat Sen himself on the wall. (Paul’s parents, along with infant Paul himself, had spent years in China, in the course of which they had come to know that founder of the modern Chinese republic.) The house was in the exclusive district that I think is called Rock Creek, and if you had to live in Washington that’s the part of the city where you would like best to live.

One of those expeditions came about in 1963 because the peripatetic annual Worldcon was being held in Washington that year. As soon as I got there for that weekend, I paid a call on Paul at his home. His stories in Galaxy, I told him, had been attracting a lot of attention and scores or hundreds of his most devoted readers would be at this con, barely a few miles away. Why not drop by and let a few of them get a look at you?

It was a simple enough suggestion, but it seemed to fill him with alarm. No, he said, no, no, that wouldn’t be possible. But I could make sure it was painless. I promised. I would get the con to give us a room somewhere with a service elevator nearby for easy escape after his appearance. Indeed, I could keep him away from possibly unruly fans, by escorting him directly to the SFWA suite, where as a past president I could arrange a closed-door session with his science-fiction writing colleagues —

Continue reading ‘Cordwainer Smith: The Ballad of Lost Linebarger, Part 2’ »

After Judy Merril and I realized that the one thing we both most wanted from the life we had been living was to have a baby, we started looking for someone to marry us so the baby would be legitimate. Judy quickly found someone. I’ve forgotten his name, but he was a fairly well-known lefty New York Justice of the Peace.

So we were married in 1948. Then we began the process of knocking Judy up. It didn’t take long. Judy handled pregnancy quite well, so we simply went on with our lives.

Which, at the time, were actually quite nice. We still both had our jobs and were therefore well fixed for money. I had bought a car — secondhand, a giant Cadillac eight-seater that Jack Gillespie said was a gangster car and quite possibly once had been. It was very easy to imagine half a dozen criminals with tommy-guns shooting up an enemy’s hangout out of its windows.

We used it to roam around the countryside, and to transport friends to cons if they wanted to go. We’d driven it up to Toronto for the 1948 Worldcon with a party of half a dozen or so passengers — George O. Smith, I think Chan Davis and his wife, and I don’t remember who else. (The reason I clearly remember George O. is that as we passed through Niagara Falls George got out of the car, ambled over to the railing and fulfilled a lifelong ambition by urinating into the Falls.)

And then, all of a sudden we had come to the time when Judy’s belly was as big as a washtub and we needed to watch for signs of needing to get to French Hospital for the birthing.

I have to confess I was not the most useful Father in Waiting. What I very much feared was that she would start in labor when she was in bed with me, or something of the sort, and I would have to deliver the baby. I’m afraid I chased her off to the hospital too early at least once, when she thought it was barely possible she was beginning to feel labor pains, and they sent her back home. But then the labor did start.

I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing when the baby came. I hope I was at least considerate enough to have been in the hospital while Judy was giving birth. But I don’t remember whether I did.

Anyway, our baby daughter Ann — I insisted on naming her after my mother and Judy was willing to let is be so — was born in 1950. Both Judy and I were then exactly as happy and contented with parenthood has we had thought we would be.

For a while.

But then it all came crashing down on us, when Judy came to me and said she was sorry but she just couldn’t help it. She couldn’t go on without the sexual freedoms that had meant so much to her. She didn’t want to get a divorce. Our marriage, she said, was working quite well and she didn’t want to change a thing. Well, one thing, that was … she wanted to change the rules a little. How would I feel about making it an open marriage?

Continue reading ‘Judith Merril, Part 3: Life with Judy’ »

Me, ca. 1972.

Gather round, dear friends and fellow fans, especially the kind of fans who enjoy going to science-fiction cons. I have a story to tell that will make you eat your heart out. It is a tale of the absolute jim-dandiest (sort of) science-fiction con that was ever held, although it wasn’t called one. Unfortunately for present readers, it happened nearly forty years ago, and it is highly probable that nothing like it will ever happen again.

The project was the brainchild of three good friends of mine. One was an astronaut, one was a communications genius who used to work with Walter Cronkite and the third was a highly respected scientist, and the one thing I won’t tell you about them is their names. You see, the three of them collectively cooked up one of the very best ideas I have ever heard, and they overcame all obstacles to make it come to pass. But then they messed up one tiny, inconsequential little detail. That turned the whole enterprise into a catastrophic confusion which gave great pleasure to some but cost others, including one of its principle intended beneficiaries of the idea, the Holland America cruise ship line, a ton of money.

That’s why I conceal their identities. They suffered all the embarrassment they needed forty years ago. Now, well into the 21st century, they are entitled to set that huge humiliation behind them. So, just for purposes of identification. let’s refer to them as Joe, Jack and Jim.

The inspiration came to them in the early spring of 1972. By that year, NASA had already made good on President John F. Kennedy’s pledge, in his famous “Man on the Moon” speech of May 1961, to put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. The space agency had landed five two-man teams of astronauts on the Moon’s surface in the Apollo series. One more was due on 7 December 1972, listed as Apollo 17. Several additional launches had been announced, but the fickle public had lost interest in space, and now they were all canceled. Apollo 17 would be the last of its kind, at least unless and until a new program began.

Our three friends, sitting around and chatting about it, agreed that this last Apollo launch would probably pull in a considerable crowd of spectators. “Only, you know,” (said Jack, or Jim, or possibly Joe), “if you’re just an ordinary citizen who wants something to tell your kids about, it’s really a lot of trouble to be a spectator to a launch. You have to fly down to a motel that’s probably ten or fifteen miles away the night before, and rent a car. Then you drive to your assigned parking space through miserable traffic while it’s still dark the next morning, then hiking half a mile or so across the sand dunes to get to your assigned observing spot, with the bull alligators bellowing at each other and the mosquitoes lining up for breakfast. Wouldn’t it be nice for them if there were some way to sit in comfort and watch the whole thing. Besides staying home and watching it on TV, I mean.

At that, one of them — I don’t know if it was Jim, Jack or Joe but we’ll say Jack — said, “Hey, what about watching it from a cruise ship anchored just offshore?”

And another one, maybe Jim, said, “Great idea! And, listen, if you really wanted to do it, maybe you could get a bunch of people like us to give lectures on the ship in exchange for free tickets.” And somebody, possibly Joe, said, “Why the dickens don’t we just go ahead and do it?”

They did. They talked to Holland America line (my own personal first choice among cruise companies), who loved the idea, only they wanted to make a real cruise out of it, with visits to four or five gorgeous tropical islands. Then they got busy compiling a guest list of leading science-fiction writers and assorted celebrities to attract hoi polloi. To all of which Holland America responded with approval and encouragement, and did they have any other ideas like that? And everything was going smoothly and the future looked good.

 
That year the Worldcon was in Los Angeles, in one of their big hotels close to the airport.

I planned to attend — actually I was their Guest of Honor that year — and when one of the three planners let me know that the three of them, too, would be in L.A. that weekend, I decided to drop in on them to see how things were going.

That was a little bit trickier than it looked. Los Angeles is one of the sprawliest of cities and, while the con hotel was next to the airport, the three schemers were clear on the other side of everything at the much classier Century Plaza Hotel in Century City. Still I did want to see them, and, besides, from experience I liked eating in the Century Plaza’s restaurants. So I shifted a few items in my Worldcon schedule around and drove my rental car clear across LaLaLand to join Jack, Joe and Jim for a very upbeat lunch.

Things were going splendidly, they said. They had been working the invitation list. Robert Heinlein was coming, and Ted Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov and at least a dozen other top science-fiction writers, said Joe. And other celebrities, too, Jack added, people like Carl Sagan and Norman Mailer and Katherine Anne Porter, whose 1962 novel Ship of Fools had created a stir in the world of publishing (an invitation which produced quite a lot of joking from Jim and Joe when Jack mentioned the title).

“And,” Joe put in, giving me a grin, “of course everybody brings his wife or husband or main squeeze. And we’re all comped, for the whole cruise, courtesy of Holland America. In your case, Fred, you don’t even have to worry about air fare, because you live near New York and that’s where this cruise starts and finishes.”

That I took to be my cue to tell them some good news I had brought with me. “Over on the other side of town at the Worldcon,” I said, “there’s a hotel stuffed full of four thousand or so science fiction fans, each one of whom would sell his grandmother into white slavery for the chance to be on this cruise. So why don’t the three of you come back there with me today? I’m giving a talk this afternoon. I’ll introduce you and, if you still have any unsold space left, you can have a sellout by dark.”

I had expected to get a pleased, maybe even a relieved response to that. After all, when you’ve got a thousand or so passages to sell and each one costs a couple of thousand dollars, you’d like to lower the risk factor as soon as you could, wouldn’t you?

So I thought they’d be happy to have the suggestion. They weren’t. They were polite, but not taking me up on my offer. One of them — Jim? — said, “We’re not ready for that, Fred. We’ve got to finalize the invitation list, and that’s what we’re here to work on for this weekend. We don’t want to start selling cabins until we know how many we need for guests, which means how many we have left to sell.”

Well, it wasn’t the way I would have done my calculations, but Jim, Joe and Jack were savvy, experienced human beings. So all I said was, “Let’s see. This is the first week in September. The launch is scheduled for December 7th. That’s not much more than ninety days away.” And the response I got to that was three friendly what-is-there-to-worry-about? chuckles.

 
And we went on with our lives. I was aware that there was a fair amount of telephoning going on in science-fiction circles — “Did you get invited to go on this cruise?” “Did you?” — but I was not involved in the decision-making, and very glad that was so.

I was never able to make a reliable count of the guests invited by Jack, Joe and Jim. More than fifty, I’m sure, but I think fewer than one hundred, and most, as Joe had said, were invited to bring their marriage partners, while a few had brought progeny as well. These were all traveling free, the cruise line covering their expenses, while the number of paying passengers was —

Was —

Well, I don’t know what it was. I have been told, by people who claimed to know, that there were a handful of people, fewer than a dozen, who in spite of the best efforts of Jack, Jim and Joe — who never did consider themselves quite ready to start selling tickets — somehow managed to pay actual money to someone for actual tickets for passage on the cruise, but I never met any of them. It is quite possible that the number of paying passengers on the ship was zero. It is true that, at the last moment, Holland America Lines, recoiling in horror from the approaching disaster, did put a couple of small nonpaying groups of travel agents aboard, as cruise lines, airlines and hotels often do to encourage future business. But most of the ship’s cabins were unoccupied as it pulled out of the port of New York.

This fact, of course, was reflected in all the ship’s services. There was only one sitting at meals and no waiting to use the exercise machines or visit the snack bars. For those passengers on the free list, it was a dream of paradise. For the cruise line, not pleasant at all. I don’t actually know what these follies cost Holland America. A figure I have heard mentioned was half a million 1972 American dollars. Jim, Joe and Jack might have been able to give a more precise figure, but we couldn’t ask them.

They hadn’t come aboard.

To be continued.

 
Related posts:

• The Ship of Foolishness, Part 2, Part 3
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert Heinlein, Part 1
• Isaac, Part 7

Elizabeth Anne Hull, me, the Hugo and Steven Silver. (Photo by Cathy Pizarro.)

I didn’t get over to the Worldcon in Australia, so when I won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer, my friend Bob Silverberg accepted it for me. Here is what he said at the ceremony:

“A couple of weeks before I left for Australia I received an e-mail from Fred Pohl asking whether I would accept the Best Fan Writer Hugo for him if he won. This is what I replied:

“‘Of all the goddamn crazy things. Here we are in 2010, you are 90 years old, I’m no kid myself, the worldcon is in Australia, and you are sending me some kind of newfangled electronic message about the possibility that you might win the Best Fan Writer Hugo. What would Sam Moskowitz say about all this? Don Wollheim? Hugo Himself? Are we both trapped in the future, swept off into this nonsense by some inexorable force? Of course I will accept that Hugo for you. It will be one of the great moments of my life.’

“And it gives me immense pleasure now to accept the Best Fan Writer Hugo for my friend of more than fifty years, Fred Pohl.”

After Silverbob accepted the Hugo Award, the trophy was ferried back to Chicago by Helen Montgomery, who passed it along to Steven Silver, who brought it over last week. Thanks to everyone concerned!

Thanks, also, to everyone for all the congratulatory messages, of which this one from Encyclopedia Britannica might be the most extraordinary. I wrote their entry on Tiberius in the 1960s!

Jack and Blanche Williamson at Seacon, 1979 (Photo by Frank Olynyk.)
 

Jack Williamson, of course, had become a civilian again along with all the rest of us. His plan was to go back to the college education he had been forced to abandon long before because he didn’t have the money to continue it. Now there was this wonderful new law, called the GI Bill of Rights, which would give any veteran who wanted to go to school money to pay the tuition and all the other expenses and a few bucks extra each month as a stipend. With that to make it possible, Jack signed up at Eastern New Mexico University, right there in Portales, New Mexico, quite close to the small community called Pep, where the Williamson family ranch was located.

In his writing career, he hit the ground running, turning out kinds of stories that were, if anything, better and more mature than before. He had everything he needed. He could stay in the large house that dominated the family ranch, where there was always a room for him.

And, yes, he had a studio of his own to write in, because he had built one for himself out of surplus planks nailed together long before.. No one disturbed him there, though if you stopped typing long enough to listen you might hear the rustling of the tribe of rattlesnakes that lived under the floorboards. (That studio survives to today. So do the rattlesnakes.)

His future seemed quite predictable. What changed it was Blanche Slaton Harb.

Young Blanche Slaton had been young Jack Williamson’s schooldays sweetheart when both were pre-teens. Jack never got over it. When they had grown to wedding size, he would have liked nothing better than to ask Blanche to marry him. What stopped him was poverty.

He didn’t have a job and he didn’t have much hope of a future. What he did have was a rigorous, if old-fashioned, conviction that you didn’t go around asking women to marry you when you couldn’t support them. So he let her get away, and somebody else did marry her, and for the next several decades Jack moved about the world and sometimes came across quite nice and available women, but never one that came up to the memory of pretty, sweet, dearly beloved — and lost — Blanche Slaton.

Until, that is, the time when Jack got out of the Air Force and returned to the Portales area, and there was Blanche. Her husband had died unexpectedly, long before his time. Blanche was a widow, supporting herself on a little women’s clothing store she had started in Portales’ town square … and again marriageable.

Jack did not make the same mistake twice. He courted her at once, married her as soon as she said yes, and in 1947 began one of the happiest marriages I know of. It lasted almost forty years, until Blanche died in a tragic traffic accident in 1985.

 
To be continued when I get to it. . . .

 
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