The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  An issue of a magazine is a kind of work of art. The IO was not just something that had come off a distant printing press, it was a personal part of my life; I had typed every stencil with my own hands, run them off with Johnny and the others on his mimeograph machine, folded the cover and punched in the staples. To me it was a creation. I think maybe there is some criticism that could be made of that auteur approach (what makes me suspect it is that although I clearly remember the scent of the mimeograph ink and the heft of that issue in my hand, I can barely remember a word of what it said inside). But publishing itself is a joy apart from the contents of what it is you publish, something like building ship models in a bottle.

  Indeed, it turned out that we sf fanzine people were not alone in the world; there was a whole society of amateur journalists who weren’t interested in science fiction but were addicted to the smell of printer’s ink. Just as in science fiction, there were feuds and splits among them. The two leading clubs were called the National Amateur Press Association and the United Amateur Press Association of America, and Johnny and Donald and I quickly joined them to see what we could learn.

  They were not, in the long run, exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I went to a few meetings. I even went with Donald on the long, thrilling train ride to Boston to attend a weekend amateur-journalist convention, a great excitement to me because I had almost never traveled without some member of my family. They were pretty good people, and I admired what they could do that I could not: most of them owned their own cold-type printing presses, real letterpress instead of the mimeos and hectographs of sf fandom. But most of what was in the magazines they published was about the magazines they published, and it seemed a little too incestuous for my blood. When my first year’s membership dues expired, I dropped out.10

  With only three science-fiction magazines and hardly any science-fiction books we were on near-starvation rations of sf-in-print. But there were snacks to be had elsewhere, and once in a while a full meal. And a lot of the nourishment came from science-fiction films.

  The 30s were the great years of the film for everyone, not just science-fiction fans. Every hamlet had its own million-dollar Palace of the Movies, plush carpets and tinkling fountains, architecturally a bastard son of the Bolshoi out of the Baths of Caracalla. Most were left over from the manic expansion of the 20s, but nerve was seeping back into the builders. The Radio City Music Hall opened when I was around thirteen. The Music Hall didn’t care much for science fiction on its screen, but the hall itself was a kind of science fiction, ultramodern of 1932, and I must have visited it fifty times to see whatever was there to see: my first color film (Becky Sharp); Will Rogers comedies; my first, and almost only, 3-D (a short subject; you wore red and green celluloid goggles to make it work); above all, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, on which I doted. The Music Hall gave you more than a film. There was a stage show with the Rockettes and the Corps de Ballet, and a symphonic overture and an organ interlude, hopefully planned to empty out the house between shows. I had a fixed itinerary at the Music Hall. Up in one of the balconies for the film, so I could smoke. Down in the front rows, far left, to watch Jesse Crawford play the organ at microscopically close range. Middle aisles of the orchestra, two-thirds of the way back, to watch the Rockettes.

  But there was a growing amount of science fiction, too, if not in the music hall, then at some other theater, even the “nabes.” The original King Kong (only film I have ever seen that gave me nightmares). Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. The very first sf film I saw was Just Imagine, produced in 1930, about the incredibly distant future world of 1980 (autogyro traffic cops, Martians, babies out of a slot machine): it was a slapstick comedy starring El Brendel, notable now mostly because it was the first American film made by lovely Maureen O’Sullivan, later Tarzan’s favorite Jane. There were gadgety future-adventure movies like F P 1 Does Not Reply (floating airport in the middle of the Atlantic, where planes refueled en route to Europe) and Transatlantic Tunnel (marvelous zappy machines boring through the undersea rock). There were semi-satirical spoofs like It’s Great to Be Alive. What was great about it, for the hero, was that some pestilence had killed every male in the world but him, and he was therefore the object of every girl’s affections. It was a musical, and the way the girls courted him was through song and dance numbers.11

  Not all of the science-fiction and fantasy films were really much good (as you maybe have already figured out!) but among them there were two that turned me on to a degree no subsequent film has matched.

  One of them was Death Takes a Holiday. It starred Fredric March. Its theme music was Sibelius’s Valse Triste, which stayed in my mind for months on end. (After a while I wrote words to it, so I could sing it in the shower.) March played the part of Death, proud anthropomorphic Prince of Darkness, sulkily curious about why mortal beings bother living their brief, tatty little lives. He takes time off to visit a house party in Nice or Graustark (villagers tossing rosebuds into an open car, pergolas, drawing rooms, reflecting pools). His intention is to satisfy his curiosity, but he falls in love. While he is on vacation no one dies. Suffering is prolonged. His fellow guests figure out his identity and beg him to get back on the job, but he won’t go without the girl…Well, the plot does not bear rational examination, but I loved it. What I love, I love a lot. I saw it twenty-three times.

  The other film that blew my mind was Things to Come. I still think it is the finest science-fiction film ever made, greater than Metropolis, more meaningful than 2001. I concede that it looks pretty quaint now, but so will Star Wars in another forty years. I saw Things to Come thirty-three times before I stopped counting. Quite recently I saw it again—in fact, took on the chore of organizing a college science-fiction film festival just to give myself the chance to see it. It is still grand.

  Things to Come was the first major film for Ralph Richardson and Raymond Massey, and I have had an immense liking for both of them ever since. It wasn’t exactly a story. It was almost a documentary, and financially speaking it was a bomb. But every frame is engraved on my mind. So is Arthur Bliss’s score. For years I had the 78-rpm album of the music, until the winter I unwisely left the wax discs on a radiator. Now I have an illicit tape dubbed off the radio, and I still think it’s fine. The film was real science fiction, not papier-mâché Godzillas or carrot-shaped Martians. It was written by a real science-fiction writer, in fact the father of us all, old H. G. Wells himself. And it was handsomely filmed with actors who knew what they were about.

  Let me confess to something. I think a great deal of Death Takes a Holiday and Things to Come rubbed off in the deep-down core of my brain. I have no particular fear of dying, and I think that one part of the reason for that lies in some subliminal feeling that when it happens it will be old Fredric March who takes me by the hand and says, “Hey Fred, long time no see.” And in spite of all the evidence, I am optimistic about the future of the world. I have a conviction bad times and good all pass, and all are endurable, and that is what Things to Come had to say. You can blow up the world as often as you like, but there is a future, there is always a future, and while some of it will be bad, some of it will be better than anyone has ever known.

  For the opening of Things to Come we fans got up a real theater party—not a very big one (I think about six of us could afford tickets), but there we were, en masse, going to taste this great new experience together. James Blish, kid fan from far-off East Orange, New Jersey, came in to join us. Like all of us, he wanted to be a writer. Like all of us, he was learning how in the fanzines, publishing one of his own and writing for others. And like a lot of us, he got his heart’s desire, with books like Cities in Flight and A Case of Conscience among the long list of first-rate work that only ended with his death, a year or so ago.

  Jim Blish from New Jersey, Bob Lowndes from Connecticut—we were becoming quite cosmopolitan. Evidently there were specimens of our own breed in other parts of the worl
d. We had linked up with them through fanzine and letter, but we hungered for the personal contact. And so, one Sunday in 1936, half a dozen of us got on the train for Philadelphia and were met by half a dozen Philadelphia fans, and so the world’s very first science-fiction convention took place. Considering the historical significance of the event, it is astonishing how little I remember about what happened there. It’s no good looking for the official minutes, either: I was the secretary who took them, and I have no idea where I put them. Philly fan John V. Baltadonis’s father owned a bar, and we met in one corner of it for the business part of the session. Robert A. Madle and Oswald Train were part of the Philadelphia contingent, and I still see them pretty regularly at sf conventions; so was Milton A. Rothman, who published a few stories (some of them with me) under the name of Lee Gregor before deciding to devote his time to nuclear physics. From New York were Johnny Michel, Don Wollheim, Will Sykora, Dave Kyle, and myself.

  The last convention I went to had four thousand people in attendance, and it was by no means the biggest sf convention ever. There must be a hundred of them a year in the United States, and maybe another hundred here and there in the rest of the world. But that was the first.

  By 1937 the ISA had served its function and was off to join the dodo and the diplodocus. There was a change in the scenario, this time. Once we had depopulated the BSFL and the ILSF, their directors, Clark and Kirshenblit, dropped out of science fiction and were seen no more. Willy Sykora was of sterner stuff. He stayed on, joined a new group called the Queens Science Fiction League, and formed powerful alliances with its leaders, Sam Moskowitz and James V. Taurasi. The three of them before long created a whole new wide-ranging group called New Fandom, of which more will be heard later.

  What we others did was equally new. Previously we had, cuckoolike, laid our eggs in others’ nests. Now we decided to form our own club. Weary of initials, we selected a name for it that did not need truncation: The Futurians.

  For that we will need another chapter, but before we get to it there is something else that needs to be spelled out. It was not only science fiction that held some of us together any more. A few of us had found an interest in politics—politics of the left; in fact, one or two of us called ourselves Communists.

  7 Ettinger is an admirably levelheaded scientist, with an engaging sense of humor. When I asked him once how come there were so few frozen prospects, he shrugged and said, “Many are cold, but few are frozen.”

  8 BSFL: The Brooklyn Chapter of the Science Fiction League, formed by George Gordon Clark. ENYSFL: The East New York (another part of Brooklyn) chapter of the same. ILSF; The same group, gone public and renamed the Independent League for Science Fiction. ICSC: International Cosmos-Science Club. NYB-ISA: The New York Branch of the same, now retitled the International Scientific Association, but still a pure sf fan club regardless.

  9 “There’s nothing hard about being a pro science-fiction writer. I could sell Astounding a story if I wanted to. It would take maybe three weeks to figure out what they want.”—I heard, and marveled greatly thereat.

  10 There was a kind of sequel to that. In the 1960s I wrote a fair amount for Playboy and was delighted to do so: not only did they pay an order of magnitude better than the science-fiction magazines, but from time to time I got to meet Hefner and the bunnies. I survived through several changes of editors and thought nothing of it when a new fellow named Robie Macauley became fiction editor. I sent him a few stories, and he bought a reasonable proportion of them.

  Then one day I happened to be in Chicago on other business, and stopped by the Playboy Building to cement relationships. Turned out Robie had been an ay-jay himself; more, it turned out that we had actually met at that Boston convention, back in the teen-age dawn of time. We had a very pleasant chat, cutting up old touches and parting on the best of terms. Wow! Every young writer’s dream come true! The buy-or-bounce guy at a major market turns out to be a boyhood chum! But it didn’t work out that way. I never again sold a word to Playboy in all the years Robie was fiction editor. Well. I’m sure it was only coincidence. But all the same, every once in a while I wondered just what I might have said or done, forty years ago in Boston.

  11 E.g., a troupe of Eastern European lady wrestlers singing:

  We are the girls from Czechoslovakia.

  We are strong, and how we can sock-y-ya.

  4

  Boy Bolsheviks

  Kings Highway has been a major thoroughfare for three centuries. It cuts clear through Brooklyn and picks up again on the other side of the Bay in New Jersey; it was the King’s road, and his troops retreated down it after the Battle of Monmouth. In 1936 it was the heart of a prosperous Brooklyn residential district. You got off at the BMT Brighton Line station and walked south along the highway, past restaurants and candy stores, kosher delicatessens and funeral parlors, and after half a dozen blocks you came to a storefront with meeting rooms on its second floor. Usually they were rented to wedding parties or bar mitzvahs, but one night a week they belonged to the Flatbush Branch of the Young Communist League.

  Johnny Michel was a YCLer. When he told me that, I was startled and thrilled. It seemed a very grown-up thing to be. Elliptically I tried to find out from him what a Communist was, what they did in their meetings, how he had come to be one, why he thought it was worth doing. I didn’t get much satisfaction out of him, but after a couple of months of building my curiosity the tip was ready to turn, and he allowed that if I really wanted to know all these things, I could come with him to a meeting and find out for myself. I was sixteen, and quite flattered to be chosen; I think I was also a little scared by it, which made it even more irresistible.

  The room was still set up for some sort of party, fake palm trees in pots and hooded band instruments against the wall. There were about a hundred people there, mostly young, but none younger than I. The principal speaker didn’t seem young at all to me. I suppose he was around thirty. His name was Mike Saunders (I found out later it was a “Party name”; most YCL leaders used them), and he gave a speech of welcome to all the “new friends” in the audience. (Until that moment I had thought I was the only one.) Probably we had come there with all sorts of misconceptions about the YCL, he said. He reminisced about his own first encounter. It had been that way with him. He hadn’t known what to expect: people with bombs and beards, girls walking around with mattresses strapped to their backs. I was a little uncomfortable with that. It seemed to be in bad taste, and besides, it was a little bit of a downer because I had daydreamed about something like that myself. But the YCLers, Mike explained, were not like that. They were really no different from any other American youth, except in good ways: Smarter, more alert. More socially conscious. More politically aware of the real needs of the people, which were jobs, security, democracy, and peace. Communism, he told us, was Twentieth-Century Americanism. The Communists were the chief defenses of the liberty-loving peoples of the world against the Fascist imperialists, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. The Communists supported the right of workers to organize in trade unions. The Communists were against race discrimination and in favor of civil rights, and the first thing the Communists had to do, he told us, was to reelect Franklin Delano Roosevelt President of the United States. Not on the ticket of the corrupt Democratic Party! No, but on the ticket of free, socially conscious Americans, the new third party that had just been formed; and we sang a song about it:

  We’ve got a baby all our own,

  All our own, all our own,

  We’ve got a baby all our own,

  The Farmer-Labor Party!

  A couple of speeches, a few lefty songs (and great old songs they were), and that was the end of the formal part of the evening. For the next hour or so we talked about the club newspaper they wanted to publish and general get-acquainted topics over coffee and cake.

  I observed them with the paranoid care of any kid in strange surroundings. They seemed to be pretty nice people. They were the right age. All the leade
rs were in their twenties or beyond, but the rank and file were teen-agers, a lot of them high-schoolers like me. They appeared to be one hundred percent white and ninety percent Jewish, but that was no surprise. So was the neighborhood. In the late 1920s I had lived just a few blocks away, at 1701 East 14th Street, and I had early learned I was the only Presbyterian on the block. Most of the most interesting science-fiction fans and writers I was meeting were also Jewish, but not working at it, and it was the same in the YCL. And, like the sf community, they were bright and articulate. I have always liked meeting people who know a lot about things that interest me, and I found in the Flatbush YCL a lot of people who knew a great deal about music, theater, art; above all, about politics and history—two areas in which I was all but totally ignorant. One of the disadvantages of going to Brooklyn Tech was that there were no history courses. Another disadvantage was that there were no girls in Brooklyn Tech, nor in the monastically male sf community of the 30s, and the other great attribute of the YCLers was that nearly half of them were demonstrably and attractively female.

  I don’t think I ever heard Franco’s name before I walked into that meeting—his revolt against the Spanish government had only begun a few weeks before. I doubt seriously that I ever gave a thought to the evils of Hitler or Mussolini, or to the virtues of trade unionism or the New Deal. But they sounded like good things to feel strongly about. I liked singing and learning new songs. I foresaw a great career for myself on the proposed chapter newspaper. And before I left the hall that night I was a paid-up member, with a little red card with a hammer and sickle on it.

  Johnny and I went back and reported to our fellow fans. We didn’t make much of an impression at that time. Don Wollheim listened tolerantly with his usual half-smile, eyes gazing forty-five degrees to starboard. I don’t think he minded the parts about Spain and peace, but he couldn’t go along with supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt. When the time came a couple of months later, he marched off to the polls and cast his ballot as he had intended all along, for Alfred Mossman Landon.