Beginning in 1972, Doubleday published a series of collections that featured early stories of a big-name author, stitched together by the author's autobiographical musings. The first was The Early Asimov; later volumes included The Early Del Rey and The Early Pohl.
In 1975 Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison released Hell's Cartographers. This seminal volume contained autobiographical essays by six writers (including Aldiss and Harrison), and proved fairly popular. In 1977 Damon Knight took a different tack on group biography with The Futurians, which told the story of a dozen or so big-name authors and the social groups to which they belonged.
Then, in 1978, Frederik Pohl (one of the six essayists included in Hell's Cartographers) released his own book-length autobiography, The Way the Future Was. Isaac Asimov's life story filled two huge and fascinating volumes, In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980). Subsequent years have brought autobiographies from such names as Piers Anthony (Bio of an Ogre in 1988 and How Precious Was That While in 2001), Ray Bradbury (Becoming Ray Bradbury, 2011), Arthur C. Clarke (Astounding Days, 1989), Jack Vance (This is Me, Jack Vance!, 2009), and Jack Williamson (Wonder's Child, 2005). Newer writers, too, are telling parts of their life stories, such as The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel R. Delany (1993) and Nested Scrolls by Rudy Rucker (2011).
Sadly, there are even posthumous autobiographies, published after the author's death. Robert A. Heinlein's Grumbles From the Grave (1990) is a collection of Heinlein's letters, and Isaac Asimov's I. Asimov (1994) was written as a third volume of his autobiography.
We have even entered the era in which we learn about the lives of science fiction writers through third-party biographies such as Brian Herbert's Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert (2004) and this year's Robert A. Heinlein: in Dialogue With His Century volume I by William H. Patterson.
Which brings us to one of the most interesting books of science fiction biography to come out recently.
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Fantasy Commentator: Sam Moskowitz and A. Langley Searles Memorial Issue
M. Alice Becker Searles
Lulu.com, 164 pages, $9.60 (trade paperback)
Genre: Nonfiction
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The story behind this volume is as complicated as its subject; bear with me and I'll try to untangle it and tell you why you want this book.
John W. Campbell, Jr. is one of the great names in science fiction, and not just for his writing; as most of you know, he was editor of Astounding/Analog from 1937 until 1971. When Campbell took over Astounding he completely altered the landscape of science fiction, and his influence is still felt today. His importance to the field cannot be overestimated.
Campbell had a close friend in Massachusetts, one Robert Swisher. Over about twenty years (from 1936 to the mid-1950s), Campbell and Swisher exchanged many letters. Swisher kept all of Campbell's letters; after Campbell's death in 1971, Swisher sent all the letters to his widow.
In the fullness of time, the Swisher letters came to the attention of science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz, who set out to edit the whole mess into a narrative concentrating on Campbell's SF career. In 1992, fan publisher A. Langley Searles undertook to publish Moskowitz's lengthy article in his fanzine, Fantasy Commentator. Unfortunately, illness and ultimately Searles’ death in 2009 delayed the publication.
Now Searles’ widow presents the whole thing in book form, ostensibly as combined issues 59 and 60 of Fantasy Commentator. Fanzines have come a long way since the days of blurry purple ditto pages; through the wonders of print-on-demand this double issue is available for less than ten dollars though lulu.com. The print is attractive, in crisp black type on white paper, and the book is entirely readable.
Here you'll read about Campbell's search for employment after college, his early forays into writing SF, his apprenticeship at Astounding under F. Orlin Tremaine, and the mechanics of the Campbell Revolution. You'll follow him through his fascination (and eventual disillusionment) with L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics.
Professional and amateur bibliographers will be debating for years how to classify this volume, but don't let that stop you. If you're at all interested in Campbell and the history of this magazine you're reading, you'll want to get this book.*
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Murray Leinster: The Life and Works
Billee J. Stallings and Jo-An J. Evans
McFarland, 219 pages, $40.00
(trade paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-7864-6504-0
Genre: Nonfiction
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Murray Leinster, the pen name of Will F. Jenkins, was one of those revered elders who have now passed into “venerable ancestor” status. His first published story appeared in 1916, and he became a successful pulp writer in the 1920s. Leinster's first SF story, published in 1919, was reprinted in the first issue of Amazing Stories, the magazine that launched science fiction as a commercial genre. Murray Leinster wasn't just there at the beginning; when the beginning came, he'd already been there for seven years. (Incidentally, he also had a story, “Tanks,” in the first issue of Astounding in 1930.)
Pick a concept in SF, and it's a pretty sure bet that Murray Leinster was one of the first to write about it. He invented the parallel universe story. His story about humans meeting aliens, “First Contact,” defined another subgenre . . . even today we call them First Contact stories.
Unlike a lot of his pulp associates, Leinster handily survived the Campbell revolution; he remained popular in Astounding and Analog until the mid-1960s, when he had shifted mainly to writing novels. Recently, Leinster's prescience has become widely recognized, because of his 1946 story “A Logic Named Joe,” which essentially described the personal computer and the Internet at a time when only one general-purpose electronic computer existed on the planet.
Murray Leinster died in 1975 at the age of 78, and left a legacy that will never be forgotten.
In Murray Leinster: The Life and Works, his two youngest daughters lift the veil to show us the man behind the name. Starting with his first short stories and continuing through his death, this is an intimate and informative look at an extinct breed, the pulp writer. The book is extensively illustrated with photographs, drawings, and even manuscript pages.
Through the eyes of his daughters, we see a man who was a consummate storyteller, a dazzling intellect, and a devoted husband and father. For pulp writers, speed and quantity were the keys to survival—in the Jenkins house, the typewriter had pride of place, and Leinster—the breadwinner—could be found there at all hours of the day and night. We get to see something of his working habits, especially his interactions with the great editors of the day—Campbell as well as others. In addition to a twenty-page bibliography, the volume includes both the story “A Logic Named Joe” and a 1954 essay called “To Build a Robot Brain.”
Yet this isn't simply the story of one pulp writer . . . it's also the story of the science fiction field itself. If we are all ancestor worshippers, Murray Leinster is a good ancestor to start with. Don't let the price deter you—if you have any interest in the roots of our genre, then you want to read this book.
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Sentinels in Honor of Arthur C. Clarke
Edited by Gregory Benford and
George Zebrowski
Hadley Rille Books, 400 pages, $16.95
(trade paperback)
ISBN: 978-0982725603
Genre: Anthology
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Another type of ancestor veneration is the tribute anthology, which gathers stories (and sometimes essays) by many different writers, all in honor of a big name author. The first SF tribute anthology I can find was Harry Harrison's 1973 anthology Astounding!, which was published as a posthumous tribute to John W. Campbell, Jr. While most tribute anthologies, unfortunately, are occasioned by the death of the honoree, there have been a few published while the author was still alive. Notable among these are Foundation's Friends (edited by Martin H. Greenberg in 1989 in hon
or of Isaac Asimov) and Gateways (edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull and published in 2011 in honor of Frederik Pohl's 90th birthday).
It's about time Arthur C. Clarke had a tribute anthology.
Clarke hardly needs an introduction in the pages of Analog. He was perhaps the best-known science fiction writer on Earth. Along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, he was considered one of the “Big Three” of SF; superstars whose popularity among readers was matched only by their influence upon other SF writers.
Clarke was certainly the most literary of the Big Three; while nobody ever believes me when I say this, there are passages in Clarke's work that are pure poetry. He had an agile mind that was equally comfortable figuring interplanetary orbits as it was contemplating the nature of God. It wasn't just that he invented the comsat and did more to popularize space travel than any ten other authors; he also left his touch on the field in a thousand different ways.
Clarke died in 2008, and it's taken this long for this anthology to find a publisher.
A tribute anthology customarily solicits new stories. In Sentinels in Honor of Arthur C. Clarke, editors Benford and Zebrowski have chosen a different path. They combed the literature of SF looking for stories that showed the influence of Sir Arthur. This gives the anthology a much wider scope than most tributes. There are the hard-SF names that you'd expect: Allen Steele, Stephen Baxter, James Gunn, Benford himself. But there are also stories by Howard Waldrop and A.A. Jackson IV, Joan Slonczewski, Sheila Finch, Frederik Pohl, and Pamela Sargent—names that one doesn't usually associate with Clarke. Yet reading the stories, one can easily see the connections.
Also included are various essays about Clarke by the contributors, a checklist of Sir Arthur's works, and a lengthy interview of Clarke by Zebrowski. All in all, it's definitely a rewarding book for anyone who likes Clarke's work.
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Channel 37
Paul Lagasse and Gary Lester
channel-37.net
Genre: Adventure SF
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The tribute anthology is a special case of another form of ancestor worship, the homage. This kind of story is a current author's conscious effort to evoke an earlier author or a particular style. Successful homage is hard to pull off, as it isn't just slavish imitation—the current authors must add something of his/her own. And have I got a successful homage for you!
Channel 37 is a website filled with short fiction, ranging from bite-size snippets to novelette length serials. Ostensibly the site honors the kind of late-night SF movies that were featured on UHF TV channels of the 1950s through 1970s (hence the Channel 37 of the title). However, Paul Lagasse and Gary Lester are writers, and their efforts also evoke the pre-Campbell stories that filled SF pulps of the 1920s and 1930s.
This is all tongue-in-cheek, of course. The writing is far better than you'd see in the pulps (or the late-night movies, for that matter), and the authors have an obvious enthusiasm for their subject. Titles like “The Terror From the Other Dimension!” and “Space Repairman” give you the idea at once.
On the Channel 37 site you can read completed stories—Lagasse and Lester have been at this since 2010—but the real fun is the ongoing serials, of which there are four as I write this. Every Tuesday and Friday a new chapter is posted; if you want, you can sign up to receive new chapters via an RSS feed.
Somehow, one gets the feeling that Campbell and Leinster would approve.
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If By Reason of Strength
Jamie Todd Rubin
40k, 10,000 words, Kindle: $2.99 (e-book)
Genre: Biological SF
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40k (or, in words, Fortykey) is an Italian e-book publisher specializing in original short fiction, mostly novelette or novella length, and boy do they have some good stuff. Paul Di Filippo, Cory Doctorow, Mike Resnick, Bruce Sterling, and Jeff VanDerMeer all have e-books available from 40k. Prices are sensible, ranging from 99 cents to $3.49—certainly well under the $5.00 threshold that most readers are comfortable with. (Traditional publishers, are you listening? No, you're not.)
And now there's Jamie Todd Rubin. Rubin is no stranger to Analog's pages; his story “Take One for the Road” appeared in the June 2011 issue. If By Reason of Strength has an Analog flavor about it. The story is billed as a “techno-thriller” but that's just marketing talk . . . there are no echoes of Tom Clancy here.
Norman Gilmore was pilot on the first mission to Mars. On the red planet, he and some others of the crew picked up a virus-like alien disease. Norman was the only one to survive the disease. Upon returning to Earth, he was tried and convicted for murdering four crewmates. He was sentenced to a jail term of 280 years.
Somehow, Norman lived to complete that term, and he's released, famous as the oldest living human. Now he needs to get back to Mars, and to do so he has to cut a deal with the world's most powerful pharmaceutical company. . . .
A thoughtful, engaging SF story at an attractive price . . . what more could one ask?
And that's it for our session on ancestor worship. Go forth, enjoy the new, and honor those who came before.
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Don Sakers is the author of Dance for the Ivory Madonna and A Voice in Every Wind. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.
Copyright (C) 2012 Don Sakers
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* Stan, I know you told Sakers to cut this title because James Gunn reviews it later in the issue . . . but John insisted that it run.
Yours,
Kelvin Throop
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Reader's Department: A REFERENCE LIBRARY SUPPLEMENT
by Don Sakers
Fantasy Commentator, Spring 2011, volume XI, numbers 3&4: Inside John W. Campbell, Based on His Letters, 1936-1952, as interpreted and annotated by Sam Moskowitz. Lulu.com, 2011 159 p. (www.lulu. com/) $9.60
One of the peculiar characteristics of finished art is that it conceals the failures and frustrations of the process that created it. Paintings do not reveal the abandoned sketches, music does not speak of what did not work, stories do not mention the numerous revisions. A writer soon learns that a typed manuscript looks better than a hand-written one, and that a printed story looks professional. And yet we are fascinated by the process, by the sketch behind the painting, the score with the altered notes, the hand-written manuscripts with its deletions and insertions. And with all the human failures and triumphs that lie behind each.
So it is with the editorial process. A new publication, long delayed, reveals the story behind John W. Campbell, Jr., and the creation of what later became known as “the Golden Age” of science fiction. An issue of Fantasy Commentator, published posthumously by A. Langley Searles with the assistance of his widow, M. Alice Becker Searles, finally make available the SF-related excerpts from Campbell's letters to his friend, Robert D. Swisher, as edited and interpreted by the late Sam Moskowitz.
It is a remarkable document, not so much in its execution but in its content. The letters provide an unparalleled insight into the formative years of Campbell the writer, Campbell the editor, and the Golden Age. Moskowitz tells the story of how the letters came into his possession from Campbell's widow Peg after Campbell's death and of his efforts to get them published. Forty years after Campbell's death in 1971, the project was finally brought to fruition through the longtime (founded in 1943) fanzine, Fantasy Commentator, as a memorial issue for Moskowitz and Searles.
What is remarkable about the document is the picture it provides of the Olympian editor as he becomes Olympian; and it is far different from the image in the minds of today's readers and scholars, and even those of us who knew him. As a writer, he was feeling his way toward his art and later the theories that he would pass along to the authors who would work with him. As an editor, he had to learn the tricks of the business from Mort Weisinger, then editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories and later of Superman comics. As a young married man he was trying to earn
a living in the depths of the Depression any way he could and sought employment as eagerly as he sought to sell his stories and articles.
Some of the myths the letters dispel are the concept of the editor coming into his office with ideas about the genre that he wanted to apply, the belief that Campbell's contract with Street & Smith kept him from publishing his own work, and his commitment to Dianetics. The new editor joined Street & Smith, at a salary of thirty dollars a week in October 1937, after F. Orlin Tremaine was promoted to assistant to the editor-in-chief. It took a year before Campbell could begin to make an impression with stories he had accepted; the letters record how he began to identify authors and solicit their input, along with his sometimes troubled relationships with them, including Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith, the grand old man of space epics. Smith and Campbell argued over the amount of payment for Smith's Lensman series and the impact Smith had on sales. The letters also record his discovery of Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, and Isaac Asimov, the authors who would make the Golden Age their own with their first appearances in Astounding in a couple of months in the summer of 1939.
The letters also reveal Campbell's developing strategies for building fan interest in his magazine, including writing pseudonymous letters himself to “Brass Tacks,” which upon occasion was changed to “Science Discussions,” when the previous name of the letter column was considered insufficiently serious. Campbell also read the fanzines and not only contributed material and information, but persuaded his friends to influence them. The letters cover Campbell's involvement in the first World Science Fiction convention in Manhattan in 1939.
When I was trying to recruit Campbell to do a segment on the Golden Age for my Literature of Science Fiction film series, he declined on the excuse that he had been too busy editing to read any of his competitors (Harry Harrison later persuaded Campbell to allow us to film him and Gordon Dickson for what we titled “Lunch with John Campbell.") But that may have been a way to turn me down politely; the letters reveal that he followed his competitors closely for at least several years after his appointment, including stories that he had turned down that were published elsewhere. They also suggest that in his business practices with writers he may have identified more with his publisher, supporting Street & Smith's policy of buying “all rights.” Even if it was willing to relinquish rights upon request, it still kept some of de Camp's payment for Henry Holt's 1941 publication of Lest Darkness Fall because it had been arranged through Street & Smith.
Analog SFF, April 2012 Page 22