The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  When we lived there, the house had been of the style called “semidetached,” which meant that it shared a common building wall with the next-door house on one side. It wasn’t semidetached any more. The house next door had been neatly amputated, sacrificed to the building of the Belt, but 2758 was still there, a corner house now, and not really looking very old.

  The whole neighborhood was much changed. When New Yorkers say that, what they generally mean is that the blacks and Hispanics have moved in. That isn’t so, but it is all built up now. In 1930 it wasn’t like that. Most of one side of the big block was an actual farm devoted to growing Italian tomatoes. One of the best things I found to do on late summer nights was to steal and eat them by the pound, fresh off the vine, warm, powdery with some no doubt damaging chemical residue on their skins, but delicious beyond any tomato I have tasted since.

  I thought of knocking on that door and asking to look around. But I have no recollection of what the house was like inside. I know which room had to be my room—the back one on the second floor—because I can remember spying out that window into the bedroom of the house across the driveway. But I don’t know what the room looked like.

  Beyond the house I remember spying into was a vacant lot where we once dug an underground clubhouse. Beyond that was another semidetached house inhabited by a family named Abbot. They had been family friends for years, before either of us lived on that block, and remained so through countless moves of both families until we lost touch in World War II. Griffith and Daisy Abbot were British-born and kept ties to the homeland. Every week or two they received packets of Papers from Home in the mail, mostly children’s weeklies like Puck, primitive color-comics about Robin Hood and about somebody named Val who adventured around the English countryside in a “caravan.” When the five Abbot kids were through with them, I inherited them, and puzzled in my ten-year-old way over this strange language that seemed to be English but sometimes wasn’t. We all played street games like Green Light and King of the Hill. We played other games, too. In one of them we decided to hang somebody—I suppose the game was Rustler and Posse, carried out to its logical Saturday-matinee conclusion—and I was given the starring role. My mother caught sight of what was going on out of the kitchen window and came storming out just as the noose was stretching my neck. On the far side of Sheepshead Bay, reached by a wooden pedestrian bridge, was Oriental Point and a small, primitive, very probably polluted bathing beach. It was about half an hour’s walk, and we all walked it over and over again all through the summers. I saw my first dead man there. He was a very ripe one, two weeks drowned and hauled up on the beach pending someone’s coming to take him away; I almost stepped on his chest, being busy woolgathering at the time. He smelled. Out along our own side of the bay, in the general direction of Queens and Long Island, there was not much between our house and the new Floyd Bennett Field except tidelands and bulrushes. They were marvelous to roam around in. You could get lost in a minute, and see nothing made by man for an hour. Now they are all high-rise apartments, built on God-knows-what foundations.

  It was a nice place to be. But the money ran out, and we could no longer pay the rent on the house. In the winter of 1931 we moved into a tiny apartment downtown.

  The words “the money ran out” cannot be understood in the context of the 1970s as they were in that quite different ambience of 1931.

  Nearly half a century later, money never quite runs out. I don’t mean there are no poor people any more. Of course there are, and enough squalor and misery to stock a planet. But when trouble strikes in the 1970s, there is one additional option. You can surrender to it. You collect unemployment insurance, or you go on welfare; if you’re evicted, some bureau picks you up and finds you a place to live; if you’re sick, there are agencies to pay your doctor bills. In 1931 you could not surrender because there was no one to give up to. You could find a soup kitchen to get something to eat. But no one would keep your family together, and no one would pay your rent.

  The other side of the coin in the Great Depression was that the landlords were in as much trouble as you were. There were plenty of apartments to rent, and it was a buyer’s market. To persuade you to take his apartment in the first place, the landlord would give you the first two months free; you paid the third month and moved after the fourth.

  Or so my family seemed to do, in one year in which we lived in four different apartments. Our first apartment after 26th Street was in a high-rise just off Grand Army Plaza, with its livery stables and luxury flats. We made our way down Flatbush Avenue a few blocks at a time, winding up in a cold-water flat1 on Dean Street, at the bottom of Park Slope. (Then things began to improve, and a year or so later we were back up at the top of the Slope again.)

  Even in those years, the pit of the Great Depression, that part of Flatbush Avenue was a bustling, lively street, seamed with trolley tracks, lined with shops of all kinds. The merchants might have had trouble paying their rent, but they put on a busy front. There were three motion-picture theaters in that eight-block stretch, and they told the story of the Depression more clearly than the stores did. At the top of the hill, the Bunny Theater was open, but not as a theater; it had been turned into an indoor miniature golf course. At the foot of the hill, the Atlantic was shuttered, hoping for better times. The only one that was functioning was the Carlton, in between, and it wasn’t prospering greatly. On Tuesdays they would let you in for nothing if you would drop a can of food into a bin to feed the hungry of the neighborhood.

  None of the people I knew personally had anything to do with bread lines or baskets for the poor. They weren’t “poor.” They didn’t think of themselves as poor, only broke. In the war for survival they were outnumbered and surrounded, but they had not surrendered (if only because there was no agency to surrender to) and they had not, yet, been wiped out. Of the totally defeated, I only encountered one, and him only at long range.

  The shuttered Atlantic Theater was a nice place for a twelve-year-old to spend an hour or two on an idle Saturday, climbing the fire escape, four stories of strap-iron stairs and landings. From the top landing you could look down like a god on the people strolling Flatbush Avenue. I went there often. But on one Saturday, as I started up the stairs, I perceived that something was different. The top landing seemed to be full of cardboard cartons. I ghosted up the steps, silent as any kid stalking the strange, and saw that the top landing had been walled with flattened cardboard. Inside the room he had built, sitting on the floor, doing nothing because having nothing to do, was a white-haired old man.

  When I say “the money ran out,” what I mean is him. Even at twelve I could figure out his story. He was alone, and broke, and had nowhere to go. He managed to get one sparse meal on the bread lines every day, and he had the clothes he stood up in, and that was all. He had no other place to live. There were such things as municipal lodging houses, true. But there were an awful lot of penniless, hopeless, homeless men, and so the “munies” were full.

  I tiptoed unseen back down the stairs to ponder this. For the first time in my life I was moved to charity. I took some eggs out of the icebox, hard-boiled them, put them in a paper bag, sneaked back up the steps, and left them for him. A day later I stole back and found a note he had left for me, penciled almost illegibly on a scrap of the paper bag: God-bless-you-unknown-stranger, and Thanks.

  And a day or two after that his cardboard nest had been taken apart and carried away, and he was gone.

  The thing about my friend of the fire escape was that there were so many of him. You saw him all over, thousands and thousands of him, in every city of the land. Younger versions of him shoveled snow, in their black dress shoes and double-breasted business suits—the only clothes they had to wear, and the only thing they could find to do. They prayed for snow. An inch of snow was a dollar’s worth of shoveling. You saw him in his improvised huts, cardboard or sheet tin, in the parks and the vacant lots, whole communities of him. And he could be you. My own grandfather w
ould have been one of him if there had not been my mother or my uncle to take him in.

  The communities of homeless men were called “Hoovervilles,” an honor our President did not like and had not sought. How much of the blame for the Great Depression belonged to Hoover, really? I tried to answer that question once, in a book that I worked on for several years, decades after the fact.2 Hoover did not plant the seeds, they were sown over the boom years of the 20s, in easy credit buying and mad stock swindles. But he did nothing to respond to the crisis. Herbert Hoover was a decent, capable man, who boasted of his kindly, fatherly record of providing food for the needy in the battle-damaged Europe of World War I. He could not see the point of giving help to people who were merely out of work, and so history, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, assigned him the blame for the whole thing.

  A few years ago I was on Long John Nebel’s all-night radio talk show, and the conversation turned to the Depression. With great joy I plunged into an analysis of who had been at fault. I described Hoover’s flat refusal to provide food or jobs for the needy, and his callous cruelty (or cowardice?) when he permitted MacArthur and Eisenhower to drive the bonus marchers away from their encampment on Anacostia Flats. I drew a picture of him as a frightened and closed-minded man who had neither the wisdom to see that fundamental change was needed nor the courage to admit mistakes, and as I was soaring through my peroration Long John passed a note to me across the studio table: “Did you know he’s listening to you?” It was so. The dying ex-President didn’t sleep well in his Waldorf suite, and it was his custom to tune in Long John on the radio by his bed through the long nights. That was a shock. I had been thinking of him as a symbol for so long that it had never occurred to me that he was still a living, hurting old man.

  I had another shock, but a pleasant one, when I was writing my book on the Depression: I found a newspaper story about my friend of the fire escape, and a third of a century after the fact learned the end of his story. The beginning was just about what I had deduced. He had had a job, but the job closed; had money in the bank, but the bank went broke; had a room but couldn’t pay the rent; and so the landlord turned him out and kept his clothes and workmen’s tools (he was a carpenter) against the unpaid bill. The police found him on the theater fire escape and chased him away, but a newspaper reporter happened to cover the story. The publicity resulted in his getting admitted to a municipal shelter; so, in a sense, his story had at least a happy ending.

  But I’ve always wondered who was turned out of the municipal lodging house to make room for my friend.

  And all this had its effect on science fiction, not only on my own work but on that of many writers; not only in affecting moods and themes but in practical, tangible ways. Magazines were a Depression business. If you couldn’t afford fifty cents to take the family to the movies, you could probably scrape up a dime or twenty cents to buy a magazine, and then pass the magazine back and forth to multiply the investment. And talk was cheap. One reason for the growth of science-fiction fan clubs in the 30s was that you could get an evening’s worth of entertainment out of two nickels spent on the subway.

  There is a populist, anti-establishment tone to a lot of the science fiction of the 30s, and in fact to all science fiction everywhere. One of the reasons has to do with its flowering in an age in which anyone could plainly see that the Establishment had screwed up the world. Rich people got a very bad press in almost all newspapers, magazines, books, plays, and films, and nowhere worse than in science fiction. Rich people were “Steel”—power behind villainous Blackie DuQuesne and evil adversaries of good, pure Richard Ballinger Seaton—in The Skylark of Space. They were the pitifully empty Eloi of The Time Machine, the smug and corrupt legless master race of The Revolt of the Pedestrians, the maniac gulgul-collectors of The Blue Barbarians.

  Of course, that tradition is older than the Depression,3 but the climate of the times encouraged it, and even encouraged that kind of thinking about the unthinkable which is one of the hallmarks of some kinds of science fiction: talk of social change. The 30s seethed with proponents of social change: Anarchists and Technocrats, Single-Taxers and four or five brands of Marxists, Father Coughlin and Upton Sinclair, Ham and Eggs and Thirty Dollars Every Thursday. Science fiction both reflected and sparked events in the outside world. When you invent a new civilized planet, you have to invent a new society to inhabit it; when you invent a new society, you make a political statement about the one you live in. Every writer is in some sense a preacher. (Why else would anyone write a book?) With or without intent, with or without awareness of what they were doing, the science-fiction writers were preaching.

  James Blish once had a theory that science-fiction writing was the specific consequence of some historical event, as Parkinson’s Syndrome was considered to be the late aftereffect of the world influenza epidemic of 1920. He could not identify the event, but he based his theory on the observation that, of all major science-fiction writers alive a decade or two ago, more than half had been born within a year or two of 1920.

  Jim’s theory doesn’t now seem as plausible as it did when he proposed it, because there are too many new writers showing their faces: Samuel R. Delany, Larry Niven, even a few who were actually being born just about when Jim was developing his theory, such as George R. R. Martin. But there’s some truth to it, at least in the sense that science fiction does clearly show the impact of the social confusion and experimentation of the 30s. For all of us who were born between, say 1915 and 1920—Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and a lot of others—the world of the 30s, which was the world of the Great Depression, was where we grew up, and where we formed our conceptions of the universe.

  1 “Cold-water” flats had hot water; what they didn’t have was central heating.

  2 After fifty thousand words of copy and three-quarters of a million words of notes, I decided I didn’t like the book and bought back the contract, so it is, and may well remain, unpublished.

  3 In fact, most of the stories I have just named were written before 1929.

  2

  Let There Be Fandom

  In the Beginning there was Hugo Gernsback, and he begat Amazing Stories.

  In the fullness of time, about three years’ worth, a Depression smote the land, and Amazing was riven from him in a stock shuffle; whereupon he begat Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, looked upon them and found them incomplete, and joined them one unto the other to be one flesh, named Wonder Stories. And Hugo looked upon the sales figures of Wonder Stories and pondered mightily that they were so low. Whereupon a Voice spake unto him, saying, “Hugo, nail those readers down,” so that he begat the Science Fiction League, and thus was Fandom born.

  If there had not been a Science Fiction League, it would have been necessary to invent one. The time was ripe. In the early 30s, to be a science-fiction reader was a sad and lonely thing. There weren’t many of us, and we hadn’t found each other to talk to. A few activists had tried to get something going, digging addresses out of the letter columns of the science-fiction magazines and starting tiny correspondence clubs, but the largest of them had maybe a dozen members, and for the rest of us we had the permanent consciousness of being alone in a hostile world. The hordes of the unblessed weren’t merely disinterested in science fiction, they ridiculed it.

  From Gernsback’s point of view, what he had to sell was a commodity that a few people wanted very much indeed but most people wouldn’t accept if it were given away free. He couldn’t do a lot about recruiting new readers, but he was aware that there were a great many in-and-outers, people who would buy an issue of Wonder Stories now and then, and thus were obviously prime prospects, but had not formed the every-month addiction that he sought. Well, sir. The arithmetic of that situation was pretty easy to figure. If the seventy percent of his readers who averaged three issues a year could be persuaded to buy every issue, he would triple his sales. These were the visions of sugarplums that danced in Hugo Gernsback’s mind. He
had a special need to think of something, because by the early 30s even the magazine industry was grinding down under the Depression. Even the science-fiction magazines. Three of them existed, but they were reducing their size, cutting their prices, dropping back from monthly to every-other-month publication; in 1933 Astounding went out of business entirely, and then for a brief little while there were only two. (A few months later Street & Smith bought the magazine from the wreckage of the Clayton group of pulps and started it up again.) What Hugo hoped for from the Science Fiction League was a plain buck-hustle, a way of keeping readers loyal.

  What we fans hoped for from it was Paradise. As soon as the notice appeared I rushed to join, but my membership number was 490, even so. I didn’t mind. I was thrilled to think that there were 489 others like me, when I had in my whole life seen only one or two. The announcement promised that chapters would be chartered in all major cities; club news would be published in every issue of the magazine, members would be encouraged to become each other’s pen pals—what fun! Hugo promised that some of the members would be foreign—imagine discussing Spacehounds of IPC or The Man Who Awoke with someone who lived in England or Australia! Imagine joining a chapter, sitting in a room filled with people who knew what you meant when you used terms like “time machines” or “ray guns,” and didn’t laugh! Imagine just knowing people who did not think science fiction was junk.

  But, you know, in all honesty, a lot of it was.

  Although I have devoted my life to science fiction, I don’t like all of it. What I do like I often like very much, but that is only a minor fraction of what is written and published. Ted Sturgeon defined the situation exactly, in what has come to be called Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then ninety percent of everything is crud.”