Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  But I knew now that I’d never run away from Wolf again. It was my own beloved sun that was rising. My sister was waiting for me down below, and I was bringing back her child. My best friend was walking at my side. What more could a man want?

  If the memory of dark, poison-berry eyes was to haunt me in nightmares, they did not come into the waking world. I looked at Miellyn, took her slender unmanacled hand in mine, and smiled as we walked through the gates of the city. Now, after all my years on Wolf, I understood the desire to keep their women under lock and key that was its ancient custom. I vowed to myself as we went that I should waste no time finding a fetter shop and having forged therein the perfect steel chains that should bind my love’s wrists to my key forever.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1961 by Ace Books, Inc.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, by Betsy Wollheim

  My father was an extreme man: extremely intelligent, extremely well read, and with extreme opinions that he voiced in extremely direct and sometimes brutal ways. He was also moody—in turn philosophical, light-hearted and funny, buoyed by childlike enthusiasm, then darkly depressed, bitter, and angry. He was an extreme man, but never a boring one. It is my belief that the extremes of his personality, combined with his visionary intellect were the keys to his extraordinary achievements in the publishing industry and specifically, in the science fiction and fantasy field.

  When I was very young, Don was a wonderful father to me. He read to me for an hour every night as I sat in his lap in the large padded rocker in the library of our home in Queens. He read me the complete works of L. Frank Baum, the poems of A.A. Milne, Andrew Lang’s Colored Fairy Books, and many more wondrous old volumes that he allowed me to choose from the gargoyle-covered Victorian glass-front bookcases in our basement. But though I was a child, he didn’t always read me children’s books. Sometimes he read poetry. Vachel Lindsay was one of his favorites because of the cadences and rhythms. He taught me to love the sound of words—even the sound of words I didn’t understand—words that his beautifully deep and sonorous reading voice made sound like music.

  Don could be difficult, but he was my dad, and I understood him in a way that was more intuitive than logical. The closeness I felt for him as a child bolstered me in later years, during times when our relationship was stormy.

  * * * *

  Don took me to my first science fiction convention when I was six. Perhaps it was there that I began to notice how people responded to him. Later, as a preteen, I saw that certain people were completely simpatico and easygoing with Don, others seemed intimidated by him, yet others seemed merely awkward in his presence, and still others were plainly in awe and even seemed to idolize him.

  Marion Zimmer Bradley, who first worked with Don at Ace Books in 1958, seemed completely oblivious to the character traits that inspired fear in others. She used to come into his office at DAW, pull a chair up to the opposite side of his desk, put her elbows down, and they would talk for hours. I remember her saying to him: “I want to write a circus book.” He responded: “Bad idea! Bad idea!” Many authors would have given up at that point, but not Marion: She banged her fist on Don’s desk and said “But I WANT to!” And as a result, he reneged: “Well, okay then!”

  When Marion was writing The Mists of Avalon for Lester Del Rey, she would often come to my father’s office directly from Lester’s and throw herself across Don’s desk shaking with sobs. “He keeps telling me to make it deeper—how many times can I make it deeper?” But both Marion and Don knew that Lester was right. Marion had always been a first draft author, but this magnum opus required more. So Don offered Marion comfort while she wrote her greatest work for one of his competitors.

  But no author bonded with my father as closely as C.J. Cherryh. For nearly ten years, she was like a second daughter, and whenever she was in town, she stayed at our home in Queens, and they were inseparable. It was common to see them leaning across the kitchen table, heads together, engrossed in intense discussion. Despite a Masters from Johns Hopkins, a history of world travel, and being a multi-lingual classics teacher, Carolyn seemed almost pathologically shy to me in the early days. There were times I spent with her when she could be silent for hours on end. But with my dad, she became an animated conversationalist, another person completely.

  Don had a talent for making people angry, but many of them were too intimidated to confront him directly. Sometimes I became the target instead, which wasn’t exactly appropriate (especially since some of these attacks occurred when I was just a teenager) but was nonetheless indicative of the dysfunctional familial nature of the science fiction field. Certain professionals in the industry attacked me for wrongs perceived by them to have been perpetrated by my dad. Most of these “wrongs” had occurred long before I became a professional myself, and I knew nothing about them. Other times, I could deduce what had occurred, and sometimes I thought Don was right and sometimes I thought he was wrong, but either way I felt honor bound to defend the father I loved and admired.

  I was used numerous times by a prominent west coast author with a penchant for grandstanding as a vehicle to attack my parents publicly at science fiction conventions. This man liked to silence crowded rooms by loudly pointing me out and exclaiming over how amazing it was that I had survived and flourished in the home of my parents, despite being raised by “that horrible alta kocker, her father.” He would then go on to flamboyantly insult one or both of my parents on personal, professional or ethical grounds. My father, when he heard of one of these incidents, just laughed and said: “It is one of the great mysteries of the science fiction world how [that author] can depict such sensitive characters while being such a boor himself.” My father was not the least bit upset. I’m not entirely sure why this author, who did not seem easily intimidated, attacked my parents through their adolescent daughter so many times. Perhaps he had tried attacking my father directly and not gotten the reaction he was hoping for. Or perhaps he was intimidated after all.

  When I was attacked on his behalf, it was always when Don wasn’t there to defend himself or his point of view. I was hearing only the complainant’s side of the story, usually delivered quite aggressively. Ironic, since these individuals chose not to confront Don himself. I was once harangued by an artist when my father was in the same room, though out of hearing. “Your father had no right!” he shouted repeatedly. Though I pointed out that perhaps he should take his complaints to my dad, and that he was “standing right over there,” he ignored my suggestion and continued to yell at me.

  That so many people went out of their way to avoid a confrontation with my father speaks resoundingly of the power of words to hurt, and also of my father’s unwillingness to compromise or soften his opinion for any reason whatsoever. My dad sold his first short story, The Man From Ariel, in 1934, to Wonder Stories, when he was just nineteen. When the ten dollars he was promised for the story never came, my dad got together with several other authors and successfully sued the publisher—Hugo Gernsback—settling for the hefty sum of $75. Despite having made his point and received the money he was owed, he then submitted a story to Gernsback under a pseudonym, and once again, didn’t get paid. (He was expelled from Gernsback’s New York Science Fiction League as “a disruptive influence” but was later reinstated.) It was a pretty ballsy act for a young author to sue the man who first put him into print. But that’s how my dad was.

  He had a proclivity for inflammatory language and loved single syllable words like “crap,” “trash,” and “junk.” These words can be very wounding, especially when wielded authoritatively by a man of letters. Such words don’t even criticize; they judge and then discount completely. Highly litigious, prone to feuding, and always up for a fight, my dad was as unlike Mahatma Gandhi as a man could be, yet he believed Gandhi’s statement that, “A ‘No’ uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.”

  In a letter to my mother dated
January 28, 1942 (the year before they were married) Don describes his moodiness:

  I am subject to waves of moods.…There are times, you surely must have noted, when I am happy and full of wit and laughter. And other times when I am sober and depressed. You have seen me coldly impersonally analytical, cynical, aloof. And you have recently seen me in an emotional storm. There are times when I am quite alone in the world and everything else is stomach-wrenching rot. And times when I feel as one with a universal wave of humanity.…

  He knew who he was, and the way he describes himself in his late twenties is a valid description of how he was his entire life.

  When he died, I read through article after article written about my dad, and I was surprised by how few people mentioned his personality. I believe it was partly because of his personality that he was able to achieve as much as he did. He was completely self motivated. He could be hurt emotionally and professionally by people’s negative opinions, yet these opinions would never sway his actions. He did what he believed was right, and damn the torpedoes. He was an uncompromising idealist who believed in meritocracy. He felt he should get recognition for his achievements, not for his popularity or lack thereof. His personality did not lend itself to acts of social lubrication. He was not a schmoozer, and although indisputably one of the greatest editors in the history of science fiction publishing—some say the greatest—he was never awarded a Best Editor Hugo. He was deeply hurt by that.

  There were some people, however, who saw through his brittle exterior to the person he was inside. Robert Silverberg, in his essay on my father in Reflections and Refractions: Thoughts on Science Fiction, Science and Other Matters, (Underwood Books, 1997) said:

  In person he could be difficult: abrasive and passionately opinionated, a fierce ideological combatant, a vehement holder of grudges. Behind the abrasiveness, though, he was actually a shy and likable man, as his long-time friends can attest; but that wasn’t always readily apparent to outsiders.

  He was a visionary, a person who could see things that had not yet come to pass and imagine what they could be in the future, and he was never loathe to take a controversial stance. Because of these qualities he was often at the forefront of emerging trends, in and around publishing.

  He founded and edited one of the earliest fanzines, The Phantograph, and in 1935, at the age of twenty-one, engaged in an avid correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft. I still have eight letters and two postcards from Lovecraft to my father. Lovecraft’s tiny, cramped cursive is barely legible. In one letter dated July 6, 1936, the great master tells my father that he has verified the suicide of Robert E. Howard, the author of the Conan novels, and says, “The loss to weird fiction is staggering.” Included in this letter is Lovecraft’s handwritten obituary for publication in The Phantagraph.

  With this same strength of vision, Don edited two of the earliest science fiction pulp magazines, Cosmic Stories, and Stirring Science Stories with no pay and no budget—stories were willingly contributed by friends. He also organized the first science fiction convention in October, 1936 (today’s Philcon claims descent from this very first convention), formed one of the earliest SF clubs, The Futurians, in 1938, and in 1943, edited the first paperback science fiction anthology, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction. He told me of a young SF writer who would occasionally hang out with the Futurian crowd in Brooklyn and “brag that he was going to invent a new religion based on science and make a million dollars.” That writer, who was L. Ron Hubbard, vastly underestimated his future financial outlook.

  One of the pioneer paperback editors at Avon Books from 1947–1951—for two of those years, the only paperback editor—Don not only worked on novels, but also on the Avon Fantasy Reader. At Avon he introduced the works of A. Merritt, the science fiction of C. S. Lewis, the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, the novels of Robert E. Howard, and countless others, to a wider readership, and in the Avon Fantasy Reader, published stories by many newcomers, including Ray Bradbury. In 1949, Don edited the very first all-original science fiction anthology, The Girl With the Hungry Eyes.

  In 1952, when he left Avon to become the startup editor of a new paperback list for the Ace Magazine Company, he really hit his stride. He brought the double novel—two short novels, bound back to back in the same volume with two front covers—into the sphere of paperback books. In this modest Ace Double format Don was able to introduce many great new writers by pairing them with more established names. These new writers included Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and Brian W. Aldiss. Although Don’s great love was science fiction, at Ace Books he edited multiple genres, and introduced great works beyond the SF world. It was in the pages of an Ace Double that William S. Burroughs (under the pseudonym “William Lee”) first published Junkie, bound with an anti-drug pamphlet. I’ve heard that Burroughs’ original title was “Junk,” but my father argued that it would be mistaken for a book about trash and suggested its final title.

  While at Ace, Don published Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, Gordon R. Dickson, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, A.E. van Vogt, and many others. He also reprinted many great works in paperback, including Asimov’s Foundation series, Frank Herbert’s Dune (which he was afraid would be mistaken for a Western because of its title), the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and others too numerous to list. He pursued his love of short fiction by initiating the very first best-of-the-year anthologies: World’s Best Science Fiction, in 1965, with co-editor Terry Carr. Perhaps his greatest achievement at Ace, however, was also considered by many to be his most notorious: the unauthorized paperback reprinting of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This brazen act, which was undoubtedly the “big bang” that gave birth to the entire modern fantasy genre, spawned years of dark clouds over the dinner table, due to vilification of my father by the newly risen hordes of Tolkien worshippers who the Oxford don himself referred to as “despicable cultists.”

  My dad was also a writer, and published eighteen novels, two full length works of nonfiction, and nearly a hundred short stories. But in true Don fashion, he was as harsh a critic of his own work as he was of others’, and accurately categorized himself as a “fair to middling” writer. He knew that his real talents lay in the editorial realm. Ironically, he stubbornly refused to let his own work be edited.

  * * * *

  My father grew up in a very cold, formal household. Don’s father, Dr. Jacob Lewis Wollheim, was a urologist who specialized in venereal disease. Grandpa Wollheim practiced out of the second floor of the family’s brownstone in Manhattan, and my father and his sister had to walk through the medical offices to reach their bedrooms. Specializing in a field that treated two very common, but at the time incurable, diseases—syphillis and gonorrhea—he was terrified that his children would touch an infected surface in his office, put a finger in a mouth, nose, or eye, and contract a version of one of these terrible diseases. This was a very real concern, and because of my grandfather’s efforts to protect his children, my father grew to be a man who did not like to be kissed or touched.

  In a letter written to my mother in 1942, he describes the nature of his childhood home: “Outsiders notice very rapidly that in the smooth, formal, surface normality of my household there are terrible tides that are sensed rather than seen. Once, a cousin of mine…lived with us for a period. After six months she moved. She said that she could not stand the chill cold formality of things.” And later in the same letter: “When you live in a family that is eternally at war within itself, a child must find some defense to save his mind.” Clearly for my father that defense lay in the escapist realm of imaginary fiction. He became a compulsive reader.

  My dad was damaged neurologically and for a long time didn’t know why. As a boy he was physically unable to participate in sports—he could not catch a ball because his left hand wouldn’t respond in time. He was a loner, a bookworm, disinclined to be social. Shy and self-conscious, his severe acne
and large buck teeth didn’t help. When he was thirty-five, he finally looked into his own medical file in his father’s office and discovered he had contracted polio in the epidemic of 1918 and, at age four, had been paralyzed for six months. After this discovery, memories began to surface: being carried down the back stairs of the house by his governess and put in a highchair in the sunny backyard, feeling angry because he was too old to be in a highchair. He remembered the house was dark during the day because his father insisted that the shades stay down.

  Irrational as it was, my grandfather was ashamed that his son—the son of an acclaimed physician—had contracted polio. He somehow believed that he should have been able to protect his family, even from an epidemic. When Don recovered, his left leg was slightly shorter than his right, giving him the distinctive swaying limp that characterized his gait for the rest of his life. My grandfather had kept this secret, believing his son might otherwise develop an “invalid mentality”—common thinking at the time. And in some ways, it worked, but I have no doubt that Don was deeply traumatized by being left without an explanation for so many years for the physical abnormalities that he saw as shortcomings. It did, however, set him on a solitary but innovative path.

  Don was a rebel: a Communist in his father’s Republican household, a science fiction writer and pulp magazine editor living in a very formal, in some ways still Edwardian, doctor’s home in a world that had never heard the term “science fiction.”