The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

John Campbell used to say that he was the world’s greatest expert on bad science fiction because he had read more of it than anyone else alive. He based his claim on having read Astounding’s slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts, eighty or ninety of them every week, for thirty-four straight years, and surely no one else could challenge that record while he lived. But now John has gone to that great editorial resting place in the sky, and I think I may have inherited his mantle. I don’t really know how much I have read, but the best estimate I can make is that, allowing for everything—books, magazines, unpublished manuscripts, everything—I must have read something in excess of 5 × 108 words of science fiction in my life. That’s half a billion words, or almost twice as many as are contained in all the books published in the United States in any one year.

  Even so, even after all of that, every now and then something grabs me around the groin, compels my full attention, and does not let me go. Not until I have finished the story, at least, and if it is really good, not even then. (What is best about the best science fiction is not merely the pleasure it gives while you are reading it, but the long serial thoughts it stirs in the mind of the reader for days and months afterward.) Because I have read so much, that doesn’t happen very often any more, but it still does happen. There are still new thoughts to be comprehended and new insights to be explored.

  But in the early 1930s—for me as one fledgling, but for almost all science-fiction readers simply because the field itself was so new—almost all the ideas were new! Revelation followed revelation. Fresh perception piled on revolutionary insight.

  It is quite possible, I realize, that some of the ideation in Air Wonder or Astounding Stories of Super-Science was not quite as fresh and innovative as it seemed at the time. There was (and still is) much borrowing, which the more naive among the readers (myself certainly included) were simply not equipped to recognize.

  No matter. Whether or not the satirists borrowed from Voltaire and the adventure writers cribbed from Verne and the humanists copied their perceptions of feeling from True Story—no matter how hallowed or tawdry the sources, no matter how often the story had been told, to us it was still the first time. This is what is now diagnosable as the Star Trek syndrome. As science fiction goes, Star Trek isn’t much. There’s not a fresh idea in all the three years of it put together, nothing that has not been done before, and usually much better, in the pages of some science-fiction magazine or book. But the people who saw Star Trek numbered forty million. The overwhelming majority of them had never been exposed to anything like it before. They had never really thought about the possibility of life on other planets, or time travel, or what it would be like to cruise through space, or how other societies might resemble (or differ from) our own, until they caught it on the boob tube, and to them it was Revelation. To them. To us, decades earlier. Above all, to me.

  When you have that sort of experience, your very glands shriek out to share it—cellar Christians whispering the Gospel by the flickering light of oil lamps—and so the Science Fiction League fell on ripe ground. We were, boy, ready!

  Sadly, the Science Fiction League did not in the long run do much for Wonder Stories. The readers joined up, but they did not recruit new ones; and the ones who joined were unanimously the ones who had been reading every issue, anyway. The magazine limped along for a few more years, stalling its creditors and underpaying its writers when it paid them at all, and before the end of the decade was sold to the knacking shop of the Thrilling Group.

  But whatever the SFL did for Gernsback, it did an awful lot for us practitioners of the solitary vice of science fiction. It got us out of the closet and into Fandom, leading directly to such group orgies as the worldcons of today, with casts of thousands openly engaged in the celebration of sf.

  I had, as it happened, met one or two fellow fans before that.

  One was a boy in my eighth-grade class in Public School 9 in Brooklyn. That was a close-knit class to begin with, because we were all united in a bond of common terror. Our teacher, Maude Mary Mahlman, was nine feet tall, ferocious of mien, and possessed of compound eyes, like a fly, so that even when she seemed to be looking at the blackboard or a student across the room, at least one facet was always and unwinkingly fixed on me. She told us that herself, and I believed every word she said. For a time. Then my courage came back. By the end of the term I had learned to look industrious when daydreaming, and I actually wrote a short science-fiction story, my very first, under her eyes on a drowsy May morning in English class. (The story had something to do with Atlantis. That’s all I remember, except that it was awful.)

  In the same class, Owen Jordan sat nearby, and lived nearby to my home. We would walk home together and sometimes stop off at his house or mine to play chess, and he was the one who tuned me in to the existence of the magazine I had not previously known existed, Astounding. The first issue he loaned me had a cover illustrating the story “Manape the Mighty,” and so naive (or despairing) was I that I read only that story and returned it to him before he pointed out that all the other stories in the issue were science fiction. But we lost touch shortly after that. We graduated from grammar school, and I went off to Brooklyn Tech.

  There was no high school specializing in science fiction, which is what really interested me. There was not yet even a High School of Science, and perhaps that’s a pity, because I think I might have liked being a physicist or an astronomer. What there was, was Brooklyn Technical High School. It was said to give many courses in science, which I recognized as being some part of science fiction, and besides, it was an honor school, requiring a special examination for entrance, which appealed to my twelve-year-old snob soul.

  Brooklyn Tech was a revolutionary concept in high schools, dedicated to the quick manufacture of technologists. In 1932 its own building was still under construction, and it was housed temporarily in a sprawl of out-of-date schools and one abandoned factory, at the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge, where the laboratories and workshops could be accommodated.

  In my second term, my home room was in Annex 1, identified as Brooklyn PS 1 at the time it was built, probably around the time of the Civil War. (Or the Punic.) It was by all odds the dingiest structure I have ever spent much time in. The toilets were plugged and foul. Leaking pipes overhead left white nacre on the walls. The heating system was a mockery, and the time was February of 1933, cold as hell. Fortunately, only a few of my classes were in Annex 1. In midmorning I shifted to Annex 5, a much newer, nicer school next to a playground, six or seven face-frozen blocks away. Then in the afternoon I had classes in the Main Building, the whilom factory, just on the other side of the constant truck rumble of Flatbush Avenue. After the first few days I noticed that I was dodging the trucks in the company of the same tall, skinny guy with glasses—he looked quite a lot like me, or actually quite a lot handsomer than me—and he turned out to be a science-fiction fan. His name was Joseph Harold Dockweiler, but he wasn’t terribly pleased with it, and a few years later he changed it to Dirk Wylie.

  Dirk was the sort of best friend every young person should have. Our interests were similar, but not identical. We were much of the same age, and almost identically of the same stage of growth, so that we discovered the same things about the world at the same time: girls, smoking, drinking, reading, science fiction. If you mapped a schematic diagram of Dirk onto one of me, nearly all the points at the centers of our personalities would match exactly. Off to one side was my growing interest in politics and society, which Dirk found unexciting; off to another, his in weapons and cars, which I shared at most tepidly.

  Dirk lived in Queens Village, an hour from Tech by subway and bus. Like me, he was an only child. Like me, he had no close ties with the kids next door. Like me, he had a tolerant home environment, willing to let him grow on his own. Like me, he had a Collection.

  The possession of a Collection is one of the diagnostic signs of Fandom. Another is Trying to Write, and Dirk shared that symptom with me, too. We found
out these things about each other within the first week after our meeting, after which there was no question that, at least until further notice, we two loners were going to be Best Friends. So we were. We stayed Best Friends. When we were old enough, we even married two girls who themselves were Best Friends, and were Best Men at each other’s weddings.

  Although we were schoolmates, school was the least part of both our lives. There was much more education in the outside world. Partly it was because of Brooklyn Tech itself, splendid school but not for us. It was necessary to declare a specialty at the end of the first year, so that at the age of thirteen I committed myself to a lifelong career as a chemical engineer, which was nonsense. (I uncommitted myself a few years later by dropping out of high school without graduating.) Not all of it was unpleasant. There was a lot of how-to-do-it in the curriculum, and we found ourselves operating machine tools and casting molten iron into greensand cope-and-drag molds, and that was fun. Lab work in chemistry and physics was enjoyable, and the math courses were challenging, but the rest was a washout. Both Dirk and I were readers, and so it was our custom to read our textbooks all the way through in the first week of any term, and so the rest of the term was unendurable tedium. But the excitement of the world outside never waned.

  I count it one of the great good fortunes of my life that I grew up with all the resources of one of the world’s greatest cities within my reach. Young kids of the 70s, I do devoutly pity you, stuck in your pasteurized suburban developments except when Mom chauffeurs you into town. I had the city streets, always exciting in themselves, and I had the subways.

  Of all the modes of mechanized urban transport man has devised, the subway is the most nearly perfect. I love them all, from the creaky tiny cars of Budapest to the shiny streamliners of Toronto, under ground and above. Moscow’s is beautiful. London’s is marvelously efficient. Paris’s runs engagingly from the super-technological to the quaint. But first loves are best, and New York’s subways are what I grew up on. In the days of my youth the five-cent fare was sacred, and so for a nickel you could be carried from the Bronx to Coney Island, from sylvan Flushing to Wall Street. If you were a young boy and willing to take minor risks (jail, electrocution, things like that), you didn’t even need the nickel. I was six years old when I learned that you could ride free from the Avenue H station of the BMT just by climbing over the exit doors. If I chose to visit friends in Sheepshead Bay, I could ride there free, and ride back at the same economical rate just by climbing an embankment, stepping carefully over the third rail, and entering the platform of the station there. When we moved to Kings Highway there was another embankment, equally easily breached. The Seventh Avenue subway station, near Grand Army Plaza, could be penetrated by winding oneself through the exit stiles. They kept adults out, but there was enough give in them to let a hundred-pound kid slip through. Of the major lines, the BMT’s defenses were the leakiest; the IRT was built on a less carefree plan, but you could take the BMT to Queens, where the two lines ran together, and thus enter the forbidden pathways of the IRT at only the small cost of an extra hour or so of travel time.

  If you chose to go somewhere past the ends of the subway lines, there was a further natural resource of free transportation in the form of trucks and trolley cars. They weren’t as much fun. You were exposed to the weather, and there was always the chance of falling off. Or of being caught; while once you were into the subway system, you were as serene as any paying fare. But the whole city was open to exploration, and I explored it systematically from the age of six on.

  I didn’t always steal rides. There were times when I walked because it was my whim to walk that time, as any lordly millionaire might wave his limousine away for a nice day’s stroll. Walking is the best way to know a city, which is why I feel quite at home in, say, London, and even now am a stranger in Los Angeles. And for most of my high-school career, my companion in exploration was usually Dirk Wylie.

  Sometimes we explored geography, sometimes other things. Not a part of his Collection, but hidden behind the Amazings and the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels he had publications of another sort. They had titles like Spicy Western Stories and Paris Nights, soft-core porn that I had never seen and that inflamed my pubescent glands a lot. In return I conducted him to his first burlesque show, doing the same for his.

  It wasn’t my first burlesque show. Not by, even then, a number of years. When I was a little kid, five or so, my parents had taken me with them to the Oxford Burlesque, near where Atlantic and Flatbush avenues met in Brooklyn. I liked the baggy-pants comedians, didn’t understand what the stripping was all about, but was thrilled to be included in something Grown-up. I kept in touch with the Oxford, one way or another, all through my childhood. When my parents stopped taking me, as soon as I was old enough to pass the ticket taker’s scrutiny, I went by myself; and in the famine period between I would still skate down to the nearby Loft’s soda fountain, and often enough I’d see the chorus girls, makeup an inch and a quarter deep around their eyes, sipping sodas through a straw and gazing at themselves in the mirrored walls.

  In our sophomore year at Brooklyn Tech, the New Building at last was completed and we moved in. How modern and grand it seemed! Five or six stories tall, with an athletic field on the roof, shiny, clean laboratories instead of the jagged zinc of the old factory, an auditorium with air conditioning and the fullest projection facilities; the thing even had a radio station of its own. Pretty Fort Greene Park was just across the street, and the concentrated heart of Brooklyn’s downtown only a five-minute walk away. The magnetism was too powerful to resist; Dirk and I walked there every afternoon, to go to a burlesque theater, or a movie, or just to explore.

  Let me tell you about Brooklyn. For the first part of Brooklyn’s life it was not a conquered province of New York City, it was a competitor. Even after the consolidation it still competed. Brooklyn had its own baseball team (the Dodgers), its own library system (better than New York’s in every respect, except for, maybe, the Fifth Avenue reference facility), its own parks (after Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park in Manhattan, he took what he had learned to Brooklyn and laid out the even more spectacular Prospect Park), its own museums, its own zoo. Downtown Brooklyn had its own department stores—Namm’s, Loeser’s, A & S—and I still think they were nicer than, and almost as big as, Macy’s or Gimbels. Downtown Brooklyn had four or five first-run movie houses, including the Brooklyn Paramount, as lavish a marble-staired temple as any in the world, at least until the Radio City Music Hall came along. On Fulton Street it even had legitimate theaters, with the same sort of bills as theaters in Boston or Chicago. Road companies of Broadway shows played there after the New York runs had closed, and sometimes Broadway shows opened there for tryouts before risking the metropolis across the river.4 And all these marvels, stores and shows, bookshops and burlesques, parks and playgrounds, were within our grasp. If Brooklyn palled, New York was just across the bridge; often enough we walked across the East River and up Broadway as far as Union Square to check out the second-hand book and magazine stores on Fourth Avenue. School could not compete. Outside it we were learning the world.

  Which was changing.

  The Depression had settled in, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated a week or two after Dirk and I met, and there was talk of a New Deal. Society seemed to be evolving into something new before our eyes. So was science. We heard about things like relativity and the expanding universe—not just in the sf magazines, but even on the radio. The world seemed to be into science fiction almost as much as Dirk and I were, at least in a nuts-and-bolts way. Airplanes were almost common in the sky, whereas a few years earlier it had been reason enough for housewives to leave the dishes in the sink and run outside to gawk at a plane. There were dirigibles, and the new Empire State Building, almost a quarter mile of masonry stretching up to scrape the sky, was topped with a mooring mast for blimps (or for King Kong to cling to). There was a kid in our classes at Brooklyn Tech who actually
flew—yes, had a real pilot’s license, spun the prop, took off, landed, was full of stories about how you could walk into an unseen spinning propeller and be chopped into ground round before you knew it, about hairy landings in the fog and storms aloft. I had fantasies about getting a plane of my own, preferably one of the swallow-tailed or heart-shaped or magnetically driven jobs out of Wonder Stories, challenging my friend to a race and beating his ass off. I knew that that was fantasy. But what but fantasy was it that he was doing, every Saturday at Floyd Bennett Field?

  In a way that had never happened before in the history of the human race, the world was looking into the future. Most especially Dirk and I. Most particularly through science fiction. When the Science Fiction League came along, we both sent our applications off at once, and almost by return mail I got a postcard from a man who identified himself as one George Gordon Clark. He was, he announced, Member 1 of the Science Fiction League. Not only that, he had been authorized to form Chapter 1; and I was invited to attend Meeting 1.

  It was at night, and most of an hour away by subway, but I would not have missed it for rubies.

  When G. G. Clark started the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, I do not think he knew what he was getting into.

  Clark was a grown-up adult human being, in his late twenties or thereabouts. He had a job, and he had a Collection that made even Dirk’s look sick.5 Clark not only had every copy of every science-fiction magazine ever published, but they had that fresh-from-the-mint look of having been bought new from the corner candy store, rather than being picked up second-hand. He even had a few variorum editions, such as a copy of Amazing Stories on which one plate of the three-color cover had failed to print, so that it was all ghostly blues and greens. He also had more sf books than I had ever seen in one place before, and he even had science-fiction fan magazines, of which I had never previously even heard.