The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

I think Clark must have been less than delighted with us scruffy adolescents who turned up in response to his postcard. Not one of us was within ten years of his age. At least one—Arthur Selikowitz, a tall, skinny polymath who entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute not long after at the age of thirteen—could not then have been quite eleven. At our first meeting the first thing we did was to elect Clark chairman. There was no alternative. Not only did he rank us all (Member 1), but it was his hall. We met some of the time in his cellar library (allowed to touch The Collection only one at a time, and with Clark hovering vigilantly by), sometimes in a rented classroom of a nearby public school. The term “nearby,” of course, refers to its proximity to Clark. All the rest of us had to travel miles.

  It is hard for me to remember what we did at these meetings, and I think the probable reason for that is that we did very little. There was a certain amount of reading the minutes and passing amendments to the bylaws, and not much else. After a while we decided to publish a mimeographed fan magazine of our own. I became its editor (largely, I think, because I owned my own typewriter), and it may have been the first place in which words of mine were actually published.

  I haven’t seen a copy of The Brooklyn Reporter in many years and doubt that there was much in it worth reading, but it was marvelously exciting to me then. My words were going out to readers all over the country! (Not very many readers, no. But quite geographically dispersed.) People I never saw were writing letters to comment on what I had done. It was through The Brooklyn Reporter that I first met Robert Lowndes—only as a pen pal at first, because he lived in faraway Connecticut and neither of us could see any way of bridging that near-hundred-mile distance. But we became good friends by correspondence, quickly found interests in common (we both were addicted to popular songs), and shared others: he initiated me into Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and J. K. Huysmans, and I introduced him to James Branch Cabell.

  You see, what we science-fiction fans mostly wanted to do with each other’s company was to talk—about science fiction, and about the world. Robert’s Rules of Order didn’t seem to provide for much of that, so we formed the habit of The Meeting After the Meeting. After enduring an hour or so of parliamentary rules, we troops would bid farewell to our leader and walk in a body to the nearest station of the El. On the way we would stop off at a soda fountain. This had three very good features: it gave us an informal atmosphere for talk, it supplied us with ice-cream sodas, and it got rid of G. G. Clark, so that we kids could be ourselves. The only bad part of it was that we had to adjourn the regular meetings pretty early, since none of us were old enough to stay out very late. But, considering what was happening at the regular meetings, that was no sacrifice.

  I really don’t know why the meetings had to be so dull. I wonder why it never occurred to any of us to invite some real-live science-fiction writer to come and bask in our worship. That would have been a thrill past orgasm for every one of us, maybe even for Clark. It wouldn’t have mattered who the author was, and I’m sure some would have come. For one thing, if anyone had ever suggested it to Hugo Gernsback, he would surely have flogged any number of them into our arms to boost sales.

  I know why it didn’t occur to me. I was simply too naive. I wasn’t aware that writers lived in places where they could be met. I don’t know where I thought they did live. I may have thought they were mostly dead—that seemed to be the case with Mark Twain and Voltaire and a lot of my other favorites. If they were alive, I suppose I assumed they occupied some tree-lined, gardened, pillared suburb of something like heaven. But still, why didn’t the idea occur to someone more sophisticated than I?

  Well, in a way it did. After a while two Real Pro Writers did in fact come to our meetings.

  They weren’t top pros; in fact, I had never heard of either of them until they showed up. And they weren’t there to help promote Wonder Stories, either…oh, my, no. Their names were John B. Michel and Donald A. Wollheim.

  To fourteen-year-old me they were immensely impressive high-powered types. Not physically. Neither were most of the rest of us fans; to some extent, Damon Knight’s toad theory is descriptive enough. I started out lucky enough, but somewhere just before I got into science fiction I went swimming one day at the St. George Pool, huge indoor saltwater marvel, and went off the high board, meaning to see how close I could come to the tiled bottom. I came real close. When I got out of the water and looked in the bronze wall mirrors, I found I had knocked off a front tooth; and so, for the next couple of decades until a dentist shamed me into doing something about it, when I smiled I smiled gold.6 So did Bob Lowndes. Clark was sort of belligerently defensive-looking most of the time. Cyril Kornbluth, when he came along, was short and pudgy, Jack Gillespie looked like an Irish jockey, Walter Kubilius was incredibly tall and wraithy, six-feet-eight or thereabouts, and maybe all of a hundred pounds. All of us came to understand early on that it was not on our looks that we would make our way in the world.

  Both Wollheim and Michel had really bad complexions, and Donald had mannerisms that I suppose had origins within his own head, but gave the appearance of skeptical contempt for everything around him. Donald always carried a rolled-up umbrella. He rarely looked directly at the person he was talking to, but stared forty-five degrees to starboard, wry half-smile on his face, in moments of concentration a finger at his nose. Johnny was a self-taught cynic, and talked that way. Donald’s voice was gruff and abrupt. They were both smart as hell. Not only that. They were far more mature than the rest of us, including Clark; Johnny was a year or two older than I, and Donald a year or two older than that. (He had to be all of nineteen.) But the real clincher, the thing that elevated both of them to at least veneration, if not actual sanctity, was that they both had actually been paid for work published in a professional science-fiction magazine. Johnny had earned his letter by winning some sort of contest, in which he supplied a plot that some other writer—I think it was Clifford D. Simak—wrote a story around. Donald had done even better than that. A story entirely of his own creation, “The Man from Ariel,” had been published.

  And, it turned out, that was why they were with us. They were mad. Hugo Gernsback wasn’t paying his writers. Johnny had finally collected his five dollars, but not without endless annoyance, and Donald had not been paid in full even then. They had come to the Brooklyn Science Fiction League to tell us their stories, and to seek vengeance.

  All this inside information was revelatory to me. It was more exciting than anything that had happened to me before, at least since I discovered science fiction, maybe since I discovered sex. I don’t know what airy-fairy assumptions I had made about the mechanisms by which real authors supported themselves through their work. I suppose, if I thought at all, I guessed that once your work appeared in print, the government, or somebody, handed you a blank checkbook, which you filled out as you needed, or chose to want, their money.

  Now that I have had forty-some years of dealing with publishers on my own, and some of them even more reluctant than Hugo to cough up the scratch, I can see the picture in full holographic 3-D. Gernsback was not alone. Other publishers have been known to stiff their authors. It is a matter of how much money is coming in, call it X, and how much is going out: Y. When X ≥ Y, all is serene. But when X < Y, then you have the problem of eleven holes in the dike and only ten fingers to plug them with. When you can’t pay all the bills, which bills do you pay? You placate the people who can hurt you the most. You pay your own salary, or at least enough to keep you going. You pay the printers, because if you don’t they won’t print your next issue, and then you’re out of business. You pay your paper supplier, because if you don’t he won’t give the printer any paper to print your next issue on. Out of what’s left you pay at least enough of your taxes, rent, and utilities to keep things from being turned off. And then you start to think about the writers.

  All this is, of course, immoral. Without the writers none of the other things matter in the least. But it is the way it is, an
d one reason for it is that writers do not write only for money. They write to be published. All writers like to be paid for what they write, but few would stop writing just because the money was sparse or hard to collect. And those few are easily and instantly replaced out of the immense pool of millions, literally millions, of would-be writers who would sell their sisters to Buenos Aires for the chance to have one story published anywhere, paid for or not.

  Of course, the stories written by the pros are probably likely to sell more copies for you than the cleaned-up salvage from the slush pile. But maybe you can’t afford to be choosy. If given the choice between publishing a magazine with so-so stories (but stories you can get) and a magazine made up of blank pages because the really good writers won’t give you any more credit, which would you do? You would probably hold your nose and publish. If you didn’t, your place, too, might well be taken by some would-be publisher ready to fill the vacuum.

  Not all publishers think that way—in fact, let me put on the record right now that the business ethics in publishing seems to me a lot more praiseworthy than in most industries. But some do, even in the best of times. And in the Depression that was the Law of Nature, red in tooth and fang. Clayton’s Astounding had paid its writers punctually and well. Clayton’s Astounding also had gone bust in 1933. Amazing and Wonder were a whole lot less benevolent, but they were still alive.

  It’s interesting to try to calculate just how much money Gernsback traded the good will of his writers for. It probably was not very much—in the thousands, but probably not in the tens of thousands. But then there wasn’t all that much money around in the science-fiction field at that time. In the mid-30s there were only three science-fiction magazines, often bimonthly. I estimate that the total amount paid to writers by all three of them in an average year was not much over fifteen thousand dollars. Allowing for pseudonyms, there may have been as many as fifty individuals selling stories to one or another of them in that period, and what they had to divide among themselves in return for feeding all us famished fans the fiction we lived on was something like six dollars per week per writer.

  I could have made that calculation at the time, if I had wanted to. I didn’t want to. I didn’t care.

  Listening to the wisdom that flowed from Johnny Michel and Don Wollheim was like standing on the mountain, staff in hand, while the Voice spoke from the burning bush. I could not believe I was so lucky, and I wanted to be part of it.

  I came back from the meetings and reported all this Gospel to Dirk, who cursed his parents for settling in Queens Village, so far from Bay Ridge and the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, and worked out stratagems for making the next meetings with me. We came. We sat at the feet of the masters, in one soda fountain or another, while the ice cream melted in our sodas and our malteds went flat, and we resolved to be just like them.

  And when it turned out that Johnny and Donald were inviting us to join a crusade to set these iniquities aright, we took it as not debatable that we should sign up at once. What Donald proposed was that all we SFL members should secede, start our own clubs, assert our independence of The Evil One, and let the world know him for what he was. It sounded great. We thrilled to the idea of causing so much commotion and trouble for Gernsback that he would perforce reform. Or kill himself. Or be driven from the society of human beings; choice of any or all of the above; and so we entered into the great world of science-fiction feuds.

  4 I saw a preview of George White’s Scandals of 1934 there weeks before it hit Broadway. I was no big White fan, but that one had been advertised as having a sort of science-fiction theme, something about how the Earth looked to Martians. The science-fiction part was contemptibly unimaginative, of course, but I rather liked the songs, and may be the only living person in America who still knows the words to “The Fellow Who Loves You.” It was lucky I saw it in Brooklyn, because when the show hit Broadway it folded at once.

  5 Mine was sick to begin with. I had a fair number of books and magazines, but no place to put them, except for what space I could make by pushing the dishes and cans of soup off some kitchen shelves. That strikes me as odd. There were not many books in my house when I was a kid, except my own. My father read nothing but Westerns, which he kept on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. My mother did not seem to read much at all, which is strange: she was a pretty literate person, could recite poetry at great length, had been valedictorian of her graduating class, even once held a minor editorial job with St. Nicholas Magazine for a brief time. (A happy one for me; she used to bring home the review copies of children’s books.) But I was fifteen before I lived in a house with a real bookcase.

  6 I also had pimples, not many, but prominently located, usually on the end of my nose and big enough to be visible as soon as I was. Donald used to call that one my “auxiliary nose,” bless his darling heart.

  3

  Science-fiction Samizdat

  The fanzines are the underground press of science fiction. They come in all shapes and sizes, the contents as varied as the format. Some is very good. The best article I have ever read on hand-to-hand combat in space was written by Harry Harrison and published in the fanzine Amra. All that I know about mescaline comes from a fanzine article by Bill Donaho. Damon Knight made his original reputation as a science-fiction critic by a surgical dissection of the quivering flesh of A. E. van Vogt, in a fanzine article when van Vogt was at the height of his popularity.

  Some of it, on the other hand, is not very good at all, because there are no standards of excellence that fanzines must meet. Not any. All it takes to publish a fanzine is the will to make it happen, and maybe access to somebody else’s mimeograph machine, and in a pinch you can get by without the latter. (There have been carbon-copied fanzines, limited to as many sheets of paper as you can roll into a typewriter.) Consequently there is a lot that is not very interesting to read even by the standards of the fellow who wrote it (“Gosh, friends, this is lousy, isn’t it?”), and even a hostile reception does not necessarily keep a fanzine from continuing (“Wow, gang, you really slammed the lastish, but wotthehell, we’ll keep plugging”).

  Reflecting the fact that everything is always getting bigger, there are some pretty spectacular fanzines these days, professionally printed, illustrated handsomely, even one or two, like Andy Porter’s Algol, which, my God!, actually pay their contributors. Charlie Brown’s news-fanzine, Locus, sells a couple thousand copies an issue. (We were lucky to get rid of twenty-five, most of them free.) But the lower end of the spectrum stays pretty much the same, and that’s where most of the action is. No matter how deficient in redeeming social virtues a fanzine may seem to you and me, it always has one: it is educating the person who puts it out. Ray Bradbury got his start in fanzines. So did a couple dozen of the best other science-fiction writers around.

  When I got my hands on the levers of power in The Brooklyn Reporter, I didn’t think of it as a training program. I thought of it as fun, scary fun in a way, because I perceived that I could make a fool out of myself in a more public fashion than I had ever been able to do before. But pleasure apart from that.

  What we printed was a mix of what interested us, and although we did not consciously think out the probability that that would also be what interested those other people just like us who would hopefully be our readers, still that’s a good way of being an editor. We printed news of what was going on in our club (“Eight members present at the last meeting, and Joseph Harry Dockweiler joined”), reviews of the professional science-fiction magazines (“The newest Van Manderpootz story is about a professor who has spectacles that can see into the future. It’s a hack idea, but Weinbaum’s comic treatment saves it”), gossip about the pros (“Doc Smith has just completed the mathematical calculations for his next Skylark novel, which runs to one hundred thousand words, or longer than the serial will be”), and letters. Oh, yes, letters, lots of letters, and probably they were the most interesting things in many of the magazines. Some fanzines, like the long-
lasting West Coast Voice of the Imagi-Nation, printed nothing else.

  We also published amateur stories and poems. Usually they had been rejected by all the pros, for good reason. Sometimes they were a kind of writing for which professional markets did not seem to exist. My favorite of the fanzines I edited was a tiny quarter-size mimeographed job named Mind of Man, and what it was mostly about was playing with words. MoM was tiny, infrequent, and died at an early age, but I loved it. The contents owed something to Lewis Carroll and quite a lot to James Joyce (whose “work in progress,” later called Finnegans Wake, was running in batches in a strange little magazine called transition). There was also a little science fiction in Mind of Man now and then, but you had to look pretty close to find it; then, as now, there was no rule that the contents of a sf fanzine had to have anything to do with sf. I wrote nearly everything published in it, including a lot of, ah, poetry? Call it that—

  Necroptic life, in Thursday bliss,

  Exploits the winnowed worker’s brawn,

  While taurine canines gently kiss

  With urine the aurescid lawn.

  I would guess that the total circulation of Mind of Man ran well into two figures, and that counts the pass-arounds; but there were those who liked it. Even years later, once or twice people have quoted poems from it from memory, and I was immensely flattered. And other fanzine editors would ask me to do “something like that” for them.

  That’s one of the sinful temptations editors put in the way of writers: “Say, Joe, I loved Catch-22; why don’t you write something like that for me?” It’s a bad thing for writers, but fortunately I was immune to that temptation at that time. I didn’t know how to write “something like that” again. I wasn’t really sure how I had come to write “that” in the first place.

  While we were staining our fingers with mimeograph ink, our eyes were still firmly fixed on the professional magazines. They looked like Heaven.