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’ »

Shrimp farmed near Golconda, Ill. (Photo by Leah A. Zeldes.)

A few months ago, in the interests of full disclosure, we published a gourmet recipe for lobster bisque which may have made it unlikely that some of our readers will ever eat lobster bisque again. We now turn our attention to shrimp, perhaps the fastest-growing foodstuff we obtain from the seas in this 21st Century of ours.

If you’re not eating a lot more shrimp in your family’s diet these days you are out of step with the rest of the world. Shrimp are not only as tasty as all get-out and a great source of protein but they have proved beautifully easy to farm; over the last few decades the world’s farmed shrimp production has grown from under 100,000 tons a year to well over 3,000,000.

That is, it’s easy if you don’t trouble yourself about “externals” — that is to say, that sometimes large class of business costs that businessmen don’t usually worry much about, since they aren’t the ones who have to pay the bill. (For example, smoke damage to public health or fish-killing runoff from old-fashioned factories. See my essay on the subject, “Fossil Fuels and Bad Bookkeepimg.”)

In the case of the shrimp farms, almost all of which are set up in warm climates on the shore of a saltwater bay, the two biggest externals are ocean pollution (China’s coastal waters receive 4 billion tons of wastewater from industry every year — and 43 billion tons from shrimp farms) and destruction of mangrove forests, which are cut down to provide sites for the shrimp farms. (A bad business tactic. Those mangrove forests are where many kinds of food fish avoid predators in their earliest youth. Absent the forests, the baby fish die.)

Some of the higher externals are the costs that all us animals have to pay — shrimp, mighty elephants, cuddly kittens and you and me. That is, we eat and therefore from time to time we have to, excuse the expression, poop.

You might think that for shrimp that couldn’t matter much. They aren’t very big. In fact, they’re what you might call shrimpy, not that much bigger than my thumb.

But there are a lot of them, you see. And they all keep themselves busy all day long, eating and pooping, and the end result (sorry) is tons and tons of shrimp feces that have to be somehow disposed of.

Something needed to be done, right?

Something was. But before I tell you what that something is, I have a suggestion. If you enjoy dropping in on a Red Lobster on one of their all-the-shrimp-you-can-eat days — and especially if you have a weak stomach — I suggest that you postpone reading the rest of this to a later date. Maybe much, much later.

Continue reading ‘Want Some Seafood, Mama?’ »

I’ve been nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo
(and I couldn’t be more pleased!)

Of course being nominated for a Hugo isn’t quite the same as winning one. This is a lesson I have been taught several times. All the same, it’s a nice feeling, and I appreciate it.

The blog team was absolutely right, too, in urging you to join the Worldcon, give them the $50 and get the sampler of Hugo nominees. It comes in electronic form instead of good old ink on paper, which I personally much prefer, but the price is right. All those great novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories would be many times more expensive if you paid retail, and you get samplings of all the other awardable categories, too.

* * *

As long as we’re talking I’ve got a couple of other things I meant to talk to you about. One is a really neat book that’s coming out next month from Tor. Its title is Gateways — note the plural s — it’s edited by my favorite anthology editor ever (that is, the one I’ve been married to for the last quarter-century, Elizabeth Anne Hull) and it came about when Betty Anne told our Tor editor, Jim Frenkel, that she would like to put together a festschrift anthology for my then upcoming 90th birthday, composed of new stories written by writers on whose careers I had had some significant effect, as editor, agent, collaborator or whatever.

When she made a list, Jim whistled and said, “That’s a list of most of the top writers in the field.” Not all of the writers were able to produce stories for her but most did, and it is my opinion that some of these are going to be showing up on awards voting this time next year.

She didn’t make the deadline for my birthday, though. I kept getting sick, and her efforts would be devoted to keeping me alive for a while. And then Betty herself fell in a bank parking lot and cracked a lumbar vertebra, resulting in pain, surgery and a lot of lost time. But now it will be in the stores before you know it, and I think you’ll like it.

* * *

Speaking of the ills the flesh is heir to—

A couple weeks ago, I had to get an adjustment in one of the contrivances that keep me more or less normal. We had just parked at the hospital where they do most of my repair work when another car pulled up beside us, and out of it came our production staff, comprising Leah A. Zeldes, our blogmeister, and her husband, Dick Smith, who makes sure we have enough bandwidth and keeps our computers functioning much of the time. (They are, by the way, pretty good fanzine Hugo candidates themselves, having been nominated for the award in three separate years for their handsome zine STET.)

I was out of there and back home in a couple of hours. Leah, not so much. She had a couple of days of being observed while the doctors figured out what she needed, then a spot of surgery, then bed rest for recuperation, and then, just to keep the doctors on their toes, a bit of pneumonia to round things off.

Now she’s back home recovering. But she still managed to get up a couple of posts from her hospital bed.

Since there have been few outright riots to protest previous doses of verse in the blog, I’ll try one more installment, a sort of free-form Petrarchan sonnet called “Shaft.” I’ll let the poem speak for itself.

Shaft

Through a die one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter drawn
Cold when drawn, emerging smoke-hot, a metal strand.
This and a thousand others woven tight together,
Attached to an electric winch and to a car.

A hole is bored through sheets of blueprint cap.
Created then, a steel and stonework frame to fit,
Straight up and down three hundred feet, the pit,
The womb of emptiness, becomes a fact.

Then blindly humans enter, wary men.
Yet blind. Ascending viciously, they viciously go down.
To rise, to fall, on vicious errands.

Iron cord in an iron-bound vacuum.
Iron consciousness, inflexible and dull.
Iron all (vicious), iron (vicious) all.

I hope you didn’t hate it too much. I would have been maybe 17 when I wrote it.

 
Related posts:

• The Poetry Corner
• The Poetry Corner 2
• Verse Decoded
• The Quadrumvirate

Illustration by Leah A. Zeldes.

Bufo cognatus

The blog team asked me to explain my reference to the “damon knight Toad Theory.” (That’s the way he used to write his name, all lowercase, changing to the conventional capitalized form when he got his first editorial job.)

Damon’s theory was that all current sf writers had been toads when they were young. By “toads,” he meant that in their childhoods they didn’t mingle well with neighborhood kids and spent a lot of time by themselves, often reading.

Actually, I thought he had something there. I was a classic case myself; every time my mother sent me to school, I got sick — scarlet fever, various other UCDs — so she kept me out until the fourth grade, bamboozling the truant officer that she was home-schooling me, and we moved a lot. And I believe a fair clutch of other writers had similar stories.

 
Related post:
Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!

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.