The Way the Future Was: A Memoir Read online

  To their editors and writers, I am sure they looked a lot less than heavenly; the Depression was still with us, sparing nor man nor magazine. But figurez-vous, even at half a cent a word, a five thousand-word story would fetch twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars happened to be what my mother earned every week and supported both of us on. But, of course, the money was not the point.

  So I wrote my stories, and I sent them out. I didn’t actually finish very many of them; I was given to beginning stories, reading what I had written, deciding it was awful, and throwing it away. In that judgment I was no doubt right, but if I had known then what I know now, I would have forced myself to finish them, anyway, for the practice and the discipline. Of the hundreds upon hundreds of sheets of paper I covered with typing in the mid-1930s, only a few dozen wound up as “finished” stories, mostly very short, and with them I assaulted the professional editors.

  The conventional and best way to submit stories is to mail them in. That cost money, maybe a dime each way for each submission. I quickly realized that for half that much I could take the subway to the editors’ offices and hand the stories over myself, at the negligible expense of a few hours of my own time.

  Moving in the company of Real Pros like Don Wollheim had given me some sophistication. To appear in any professional science-fiction magazine would be total ecstasy, but some magazines offered more ecstasy than others, or at least more money, and so I started at the top.

  Astounding had gone down the tube as a member of the Clayton pulp chain, but Street & Smith had bought into the wreckage, and it was back in business. Its editor was a man named F. Orlin Tremaine, and it was housed in a dilapidated old slum on Seventh Avenue, a block below Barney’s clothing store. I have no idea when the building was new, probably sometime in the Middle Jurassic. The lower floors were filled with printing presses, shaking the whole structure as they rolled. The building had a hydraulic elevator. To make it go up or down, the operator had to tug on a rope outside the car itself. The building had long since been declared a hazard by the fire marshal, and so smoking was prohibited everywhere in it. (That didn’t actually stop anybody, it only inconvenienced them a little. When John Campbell became editor a little later on, he kept a copper ashtray on his desk, copper because of its high thermal conductivity, and whisked it into a drawer when the early-warning system announced the presence of a fire warden.) To get from the reception room to any editor’s office involved going up and down staircases, squeezing past rolls of paper stored to feed the ground-floor presses, reveling in the fascinating smells of printer’s ink and rotting wood.

  I didn’t get past the reception room the first couple of times. I was met at the desk by a diffident young male assistant to Tremaine; he took the manuscript from my grubby young hands, flipped through it, and announced that I didn’t have my name and address typed in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. It was on the last page, I told him. Well enough, he said, but it’s supposed to be on the first one. He also pointed out that standard typing paper was 8½ × 11 inches and plain white, while what I was using was several inches longer than that and had narrow blue lines down the left-hand margin. Sorry about that, I said. (I didn’t tell him the reason. My mother worked in a law office at that time, and legal cap was what she filched to bring home to me.) But he allowed me to leave the story with him, and a week or two later I got a penny postcard from Street & Smith, announcing that it was “ready for pickup.” The card was a printed form, from which I deduced that I was not the only writer who had more time than postage stamps.

  I came to see a great many of those cards over the years. Tremaine never bought a word from me, or even came very close. But he was nice about it. After the first couple of submissions he began inviting me down to his office to chat, and toward the end of his tenure even took me out to lunch now and then.

  I cannot tell you how much this inflated me, not only in my own ego but in the estimation of my fellow fans. Heaven knows what he got out of it. Since I was editing several fanzines at the time, it is possible that he mistook me for some kind of power figure among the readers, but I don’t really think so. I think Tremaine was just a good guy.

  He was also a good editor. John Campbell is the worshipped god in the pantheon of Astounding, but Tremaine did some smart things. It was not his fault that he knew nothing at all about science fiction when he took it on; Street & Smith bought it and handed it to him as a chore, and that was that. He did his best to learn, and he succeeded. He published some incredible rot. He even wrote some of the sappiest of it, or at least so gossip says: “Warner Van Lorne,” one of the most frequent bylines in his magazine, was supposed to be Tremaine himself. But he did some very smart things. (Including hiring John Campbell to succeed him when he was moved upstairs.) I liked him, respected him, missed him when he left, and wondered if this young punk Campbell would ever measure up to Tremaine’s standards.

  Tremaine was no scientist, and so Astounding during his tenure was likely to come up with some galumphing horrors, but the virtue of that defect was that he was able to publish some pretty fascinating stuff that any scientifically trained person would never touch. Not just stories. Astounding ran nearly the complete works of Charles Fort, in interminable serial form, compendia of curious and inexplicable happenings: minnows falling from a clear sky, strange lights of airships seen before airships were invented. The towering flights of fantasy in the Tremaine Astounding were an attractive change from the nuts-and-bolts gadgetry of Gernsback’s Wonder or the stilted stodge of T. O’Conor Sloane’s Amazing.

  Nevertheless, as Astounding didn’t seem to want to buy what I had to sell, I took my wares to the others, too. Wonder Stories was a grubby kind of magazine, full of self-glorifying little digs at the competition, such as long lists of titles of stories published in other magazines under the heading “Stories We Reject Appear Elsewhere.” (Don Wollheim said it should have read “Stories We Don’t Pay For Appear Elsewhere.”) Yet it had two things going for it. One was that the major find of the mid-30s, a new writer named Stanley G. Weinbaum, turned up there long before he was seen in any other magazines. Weinbaum was great; his first story, “A Martian Odyssey,” still appears on most lists of all-time best science fiction. Well it should. Weinbaum invented in it a character of a sort no one had thought to create before, an ostrich-shaped alien creature named Tweel who didn’t think, talk, act, or look like a human, but was nevertheless a person. All other writers in the field, once the egg had been demonstrated to stand on its end, immediately began to invent personalized alien creatures of their own, and have continued to do so ever since.

  The other thing that made Wonder attractive was that they had mighty nice rejection slips. From Astounding I never even saw a slip, just the penny postcard that told me to come and carry away another corpse, but most magazines printed up little three-by-five or so forms, along the general lines of

  We regret that your submitted material is not suitable for our needs at this time, but thank you for submitting it.

  THE EDITORS

  Wonder’s were nothing like that. I usually wrote very short stories, hardly having the confidence to tackle anything much over two thousand words, and so it seemed to me more than once that Wonder’s rejections were longer than the stories concerned. There was a form letter signed by Hugo himself, benignly explaining how strict his standards were. There was a printed check-off sheet, listing thirty or so reasons for rejection:

  ( ) Plot stale

  ( ) Errors in science

  ( ) Material offensive to moral standards

  and lots more. And, to take the sting out of it, there was a jolly little “translation” of a “Chinese rejection slip.” (“Your honorable contribution is so breathtakingly excellent that we do not dare publish it, since it would set a standard no other writer would be able to reach.”) It was almost fun to be rejected by Wonder. Impersonal fun, though. Hugo Gernsback was by no means as gregarious a personality as F. Orlin Tremaine.
r />   Their offices were on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, and Dirk and I hiked over there from Brooklyn Tech a time or two. We milled around in the anteroom, under the original oil paintings of covers from his gadget and radio magazines, but we never got past the reception desk. After about two visits the girl made it clear to us that we never would, and so for submissions to Wonder I scraped up stamp money.

  I never got past the reception desk at Amazing, either, but T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., did something for me no other editor had done. He made me a pro. Sloane was quite an old man, white-bearded and infirm of gait. He was a marvel to me just on account of age—my own grandfather, who died around that time, was only in his sixties, and Sloane was at least a decade or two past that. But he was amiable and cordial enough; he would totter out to meet me, chat for a moment, and retire with that week’s offering in his hand.

  His talent as a science-fiction editor was not, I am sorry to say, marked. His scientific attitudes had been fixed somewhere around the rosy twilight of his career, say 1910, and anything since then he dismissed as fantasy. He put himself firmly on record as denying that any human being would ever leave the surface of the Earth in a spaceship, and to us Skylark addicts that was diagnostically treason. What he published was a queer mix of flamboyant space adventure and barely imaginative stories of exploration, all heavily weighted with his interminably balanced blurbs, editorials, and comments on letters.

  I cannot resist describing one set of the space adventures for you. They began with a story called “The Jameson Satellite,” written by Neil R. Jones. “The Jameson Satellite” was about a very rich university professor who had nothing much to do with his money and nobody to leave it to. He decided to use it to make himself the dandiest tomb a fellow could have, and so he built in his backyard a rocket ship, big and powerful enough to take his body into orbit, where it would circle Earth, preserved by the absolute zero of space, until the end of time. After a while, it all came about as he planned. He died. His executor had his unembalmed corpse loaded into the rocket, they lit the fuse, and zap, there went all that was mortal of Professor Jameson right into orbit.

  But there was more. The Earth rolled along. Time passed. The human race became extinct, the sun itself grew cold—and yet Jameson was still there in the deepfreeze. And then, in the fullness of time, strangers came poking around. They were machine-men called Zoromes. They had once had fleshly bodies, more or less like you and me (except that they had tentacles and a few other peculiarities of anatomy), and when they discovered the Jameson satellite with its cargo of still-fresh meat, it was no trouble for them to do with the human corpse what they had done with their own bodies long and long ago: They built him a machine body, took out his brain, thawed it, and stuck it into the machine. And so thereafter, for endless adventures, Professor Jameson lived once again as the Zorome called 21MM392.

  The Zorome stories were among the most popular series of the 1930s, and not just with me. There was another reader, a youngster named Bob Ettinger, who liked them as much as I did. A few decades later, when Ettinger was grown up and a scientist on the faculty of a Midwest university, he remembered old Professor Jameson’s deepfreeze and wondered just how much science was in that science fiction. So he dug into the biochemistry and the physics, checked out what was known about the effects of liquid gas temperatures on animal tissue, even costed the current quotations for liquid helium and triply insulated containers big enough to hold you and me…and evolved the proposal described in his book, The Prospects of Immortality, for freezing everyone who dies until such time as medical science figures out how to thaw him out and repair him. Right now there are a couple of dozen corpsicles in the United States (Walt Disney is supposed to be one of them) waiting for that great thawing-out day. It is not yet clear whether they will make it or not; as Bob Ettinger says, they’re halfway there; they’ve frozen quite a few but haven’t thawed any out yet.7 But if they do make it, they will owe quite a bit to Neil R. Jones and 21MM392.

  In my personal scale of priorities, the fact that Sloane gave the world the freezing program is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that he gave me my first paid publication ever. It wasn’t a story, it was a poem (called “Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna,” and if you feel for any reason that you must read it—I don’t know why that would be so—you can find it in a book called The Early Pohl). People ask me from time to time when I made my first sale. For me, that’s hard to answer. I wrote the poem in 1935, Sloane accepted it in 1936. It was published in 1937. And I was paid for it in 1938.

  Funny thing. I never had another line in Amazing, from that day to this. Sloane actually accepted another poem, and I had bright hopes of laying stories on him as well, but before anything could be published, much less paid for, Amazing too was sold to the knackers, and Sloane disappeared from the science-fiction scene. The new owners made it sell better than it ever had, but by publishing fairly simple-minded stories—or so I judged them; the objective facts are that I didn’t care much for what they published, and they didn’t care much for what I wrote, and after a while I stopped even trying them. By then I had found more hospitable markets, anyway. But there’s a certain nostalgia. You never forget your first sale.

  But I am ahead of myself; before I became a Pro I had a few years of fandom to get through, and things had happened in my personal life, too.

  My parents separated when I was thirteen years old, not amicably. My plunging father took one shortcut too many and wound up in trouble with the law, not just creditor trouble but grand jury trouble. I was never told the details. One day he was gone, and my mother told me he would not be coming back to live with us any more; it was three or four years before I saw him again, but, in all candor, I didn’t much mind. He had seemed a guest in the house all along. He traveled a lot, and even when he was technically at home he was away most of the days, and a lot of the nights.

  Looking back at it objectively, it must not have been a tranquil time for me. Yet I don’t know where the scars are. Like all writers, I spend a lot of time exploring the inside of my own head, and once or twice I’ve had professional help in the rummaging around. Like all human beings, I have childhood pains or worries or yearnings unmet that still show up in a barroom or on a couch; how strange that any of the race survives, when we are all so vulnerable in childhood. But I did not feel very bad about my parents at the time. The focus of my life had moved out of the home long before then, perhaps when I learned to live vicariously through books, certainly when I found the world of science fiction to explore. In school and at home I was still a child, the passive object of what the authority figures chose to do; but in science fiction I could be a maker and shaker on my own. Well, no. Not entirely on my own. Don Wollheim was the leader of our junta and the planner of our coups, but we were at the least his kitchen cabinet, Johnny Michel, and a little later Bob Lowndes, and I, and we four marched from Brooklyn to the sea, leaving a wide scar of burned-out clubs behind us. We changed clubs the way Detroit changes tailfins, every year had a new one and last year’s was junk.

  1934 was the year of the BSFL. 1935 was the year of the ENYSFL, later the ILSF. 1936 was the year of the ICSC, later the NYB-ISA. By 1937 we had got tired of initials, and of laying our cuckoos’ eggs in other people’s nests, and we formed The Futurians.8

  The Brooklyn SFL lasted barely a year, just barely long enough for us to find each other. It did not long survive the invasion of the barbarians. G. G. Clark did not care for Donald and Johnny, and must have resented being shoved off the seat of power. (“Am I not Member One? Was I not chartered to possess Chapter One by Hugo himself?”) But Hugo had chartered chapters everywhere he could, on whatever flimsy pretext any member had the gall to offer him. Dave Kyle even started a chapter in Monticello, New York, of which the entire membership was pseudonyms of his own. There was already another chapter in Brooklyn, the ENYSFL, and we birds of passage flew on.

  The East New York SFL was the fiefdom of a high-schooler named Harold W.
Kirshenblit (“KB”), who also had a big cellar his parents allowed him to use for meetings. You took the BMT as far as it went, and then walked. KB was a livelier, sharper article than Clark, willing to make and shake with us, and in no time Donald talked him into seceding from Wonder Stories and creating a new worldwide competitor to the SFL. Donald was not alone—Johnny and I helped in every way we could—but it was Donald’s wrath that moved us all, and his decision, I think, to point up what was going on by naming the new construct the Independent League for Science Fiction. Lowndes showed up in the flesh at the ILSF and immediately joined the team. For the next five years or so we four stuck together, called ourselves “the Quadrumvirate,” and made our presence known wherever we were. At the end of a year East New York had no further charms, and so we all moved on to Astoria, Queens, where William S. Sykora had a club in his basement. Having a house with a basement was a lot like owning a catcher’s mitt; you could always start a game of your own.

  Will Sykora was a medium-sized man with enormous sloping shoulders. He had immense self-confidence9 and a bump of arrogance that comported ill with our own collective and individual bumps of arrogance. Nevertheless, he had a group that seemed to be doing things. He had called it the International Cosmos Science Club, but on reflection “cosmos” seemed to take in a bit more territory than was justified, and so he changed it to the International Scientific Association. (It wasn’t international, either, but then it also wasn’t scientific.)

  Both the BSFL and the ILSF had published club journals, but they didn’t amount to much. The ISA’s magazine was something else. It was called The International Observer, and, at least when we spread ourselves on a special issue, it was something to see. I became its editor, and I recall the immense pride of holding in my hand one issue, forty or more pages long, cover silk-screened in color by Johnny Michel, inside with hand-lettered titles and justified margins and even a little bit of art; I think that may have been the biggest fanzine published at that time, and I was supremely certain it was the best.