The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  Fine! But how? I was still putting in seventy-hour weeks. At the current rate of progress it was two or three years in the future, at best, and here Horace was talking about having a cover painted and scheduling it as soon as Alfie Bester’s The Demolished Man was through.

  By then Judy and I had bought the big old New Jersey house I still live in, just across the river from Red Bank, and we had house guests. Cyril Kornbluth and his pregnant wife, Mary, had come to stay with us while they sorted things out. Cyril had quit his job as a wire-service news editor in Chicago to come east to free-lance. Naturally he was one of my clients. He was also my tried and trusted old collaborator. And he was right there in the house.

  I showed him my twenty-thousand-word fragment. We chatted for a while about where I thought I was going. Phil Klass, alias William Tenn, had made a suggestion about having the hero do the Haroun al Raschid bit, wandering around the planet as a plebeian instead of an upper-crust advertising executive, and I thought that was a profitable area to explore. Cyril agreed and took the manuscript away, and when I saw him again he had rewritten the first twenty thousand words and added a whole new middle section. The last third we wrote turn and turn about, and then I put the whole thing through the typewriter one more time, and what came out Galaxy serialized as Gravy Planet.

  As The Space Merchants, the book has had quite a career. I have a shelf made up of nothing but editions of it, in some twenty-five languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Latvian, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Romanian, and a dozen others. There are seven different English-language editions, from seven different publishers. We sold the film rights for a pretty penny:42 it was broadcast on CBS’s Columbia Workshop, and you can still buy pirated tape cassettes of the dramatization. For that matter, you can still buy the book. I don’t know how many copies of it have been printed worldwide. There’s no good way to tell, since there are several pirated editions I know of only from hearsay, not to mention the Eastern European editions on which no royalty statements have ever been furnished (or, of course, royalties paid). But it may be somewhere around ten million.

  Not bad, right? And obviously, any book with that kind of potential had to be snapped up by the first book publisher to see it, right?

  Well, it didn’t happen that way. The book market for science fiction was booming when Gravy Planet came out, and I had little doubt that we would find a home for it. Unfortunately, the book editors didn’t see it that way. I submitted it to every trade publisher, one by one, in the United States with a science-fiction line—toward the end, with even a hope that they might consider having a science-fiction line. And, one by one, they turned it down.

  You must remember that I was not some rank outsider trying to get my first lucky break. As an agent, I was selling big chunks of material to all of them. Most of the editors were personal friends. But they didn’t allow that to influence them, and in fact one or two were not even very kind about it. One very good friend handed the manuscript back to me and said, in tones of great sorrow, “Fred, look. I don’t know how to tell you this, but it’s no good. There are a couple of good ideas, sure. But you don’t know how to handle them. What you need is some good professional writer to pull the whole thing together.”

  I never did find that good professional writer. What I found was an unprofessional publisher. His name was Ian Ballantine.

  Judy had worked for him for a year or two, when he was president of Bantam Books and she was their science-fiction and mystery editor. Bantam mostly limited itself to reprinting hard-cover books, and so I had little to do with them as an agent. But I came to know some of the Bantam people pretty well—Arnold Hano, the managing editor (who greeted me with the tepid enthusiasm reserved for the husbands of colleagues until he found out I had written the copy for the “huge white bride’s bed” ad he had tacked over his desk), and Ian Ballantine himself.

  Ian had started Bantam and made it thrive. But in 1951 he and they had come to a tight place. He wanted to try some new ideas; Bantam’s owners were happy with the good old procedures that were working very well, thank you. And so Ian took his courage in his hands and set up his own publishing house of Ballantine Books.

  Ian Ballantine is not a physically dominating figure. He is short, and shaped mostly like a penguin. He has flaring John L. Lewis eyebrows and a habit of replying at right angles to any question. His wife, partner, and chief executive officer, Betty, makes up the difference. She is not only beautiful and sexy but a good fifty percent smarter than most publishing people; but I don’t believe even Betty always follows Ian’s logic.

  No matter. A genius doesn’t need logic. Ian Ballantine is a publishing genius. Half the major categories of paperback books on the stands today are there because Ian Ballantine had the wit and courage to try them out when no one else dared. He was the first paperback publisher to do serious amounts of science fiction, the first with books on the ecology, with mass-market art books, with war books; with books in unusual formats, sold through unusual channels. Without Ian Ballantine the paperback book business would be far tinier and more dull than it is.

  All of this is true, and is one of the reasons why Ian Ballantine was my favorite publisher for a quarter of a century, but not all of it was evident in 1951 and 1952. The firm of Ballantine Books, Inc., was operating out of Ian and Betty’s Chelsea penthouse. It was a big, handsome apartment. It probably would have been gracious and luxurious if it had not been crammed full of card-table desks and cardboard-carton filing cabinets. Their editorial staff was there, notably Bernard W. Shir-Cliff and Stanley Kauffmann.43 So were most of the business department, and the art department, and the publicity department, and Ian and Betty’s ten-year-old son, Richard, whose bedroom was the only corner of the house not ceiling-high with manuscripts and galley proofs. Fortunately for the sanity of all of us, after a couple of months Ballantine Books found office space on Fifth Avenue. From then on, having dinner with Ian and Betty was just as stimulating, but a lot less athletic.

  Ian’s principal innovation was a decision to publish both hard- and soft-cover editions of all of his books simultaneously. The skeptics said it would never work. Who would pay hard-cover prices when they could pick up a paperback of the same book for a tenth of the money?

  In the long run, it turned out that the skeptics were right, or almost so. But they were right for the wrong reasons. The customers seemed perfectly happy to accept both editions; I saw with my own eyes a good many people carrying around three-dollar hard-cover editions of Ian’s first big bestseller, Cameron Hawley’s Executive Suite, right past newsstands where the paperback was on sale for thirty-five cents. But the wise old hands of the publishing business knew it wouldn’t work. The terrible thing about these wise old hands is that even when they are wrong, their convictions make them right. When dealers, jobbers, wholesalers, and salesmen think something won’t work, they pull back, and the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling.

  Simultaneous hard- and soft-cover sounded pretty jazzy to me, so I showed the tear sheets of Gravy Planet to Ian. Poor fellow, he was just too inexperienced a publisher to know it was no good. So he published it. And kept on publishing it, for twenty-some years.

  Not only that, now that he had caught the sf fever he wanted more. I trotted out half a dozen candidates from the limitless resources of my agency, and he bought them all. We will do one science-fiction title a month, Ian decided, but in order to assure a supply, we will have to figure out some way of keeping our image bright in the memories of all science-fiction writers. How do we go about that?

  Well, I said, you could publish an anthology. There is nothing like getting checks, even smallish anthology-sized checks, to make a writer aware of your existence. Come to that, I’d be glad to edit one for you.

  Ian pondered that for a moment, and then his face lit up. No, he said, I don’t want to do what all the other publishers have done. I want to do something original—in fact, what I want to do is an
anthology of all original stories. You edit it. We’ll outpay the magazines, to get the very best. We’ll call it—we’ll call it—well, never mind, we’ll think of something to call it. You get the stories.

  That’s how Star Science Fiction was born. There have been a good many imitations of it since, but Star was the first regular series of anthologies of originals.

  And, you know, not bad, either. It should have been pretty good; I had everything going for me. So many of the best writers in the field were my clients that I could easily get first look at the cream of the crop. I couldn’t shortstop it all. I had, after all, some obligations to the editors I had been dealing with. But I also had some obligations to my writers, and Ian had opened the treasure chest wide enough so that we were paying twice as much as the magazines.

  So I began assembling stories, first by checking out what my own clients had to offer. About that time I realized that it wasn’t entirely fair for me to take a commission on sales I made to myself, so I waived the ten percent (which meant that a sizable fraction of my earnings as editor was lost back in forgiven commissions). Even so, I was pleased to be able to print Cliff Simak’s “Contraption,” John Wyndham’s “The Chronoclasm,” Isaac Asimov’s “Nobody Here But—,” Judy Merril’s “So Proudly We Hail,” H. L. Gold’s “The Man with English”; Fritz Leiber did a wildly funny burlesque of Mickey Spillane, “The Night He Cried”; William Tenn and Robert Sheckley had bright, satirical stories called “The Deserter” and “The Last Weapon”…and then there was the case of Joe Samachson. Under his pen name, William Morrison, Joe was one of the great unrecognized all-time pros of science fiction. He was always competent, and once in a while great—as in “The Sack.” This time he had a peak again, with my favorite story in the whole book, “Country Doctor.”

  That was more than half the lineup. I didn’t want to publish only the work of my clients, and fortunately by then the word had got around that this new volume would be worth appearing in. I was able to get first-rate stories from Lester del Key, Ray Bradbury, Murray Leinster, Arthur C. Clarke and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. It all worked well, and over the years we did half a dozen more just like it.

  It also gave me perhaps the sweetest moment of revenge I have ever tasted, on the hapless body of Horace Gold.

  The thing about Horace was that he was a dynamite editor, energetic, talented, skilled, but he had this one little fault. He could not keep his fingers off his writers’ prose. He got his training under Leo Margulies, in the old pulp-chain days when an editor’s productivity was measured by the proportion of pencil markings on the pages he sent to the printer. Horace never forgot the lessons learned at Leo’s knee.

  He drove some writers wild. Even Cyril Kornbluth, compleat pro, casehardened against all editorial madness. Even me. We all muttered in our beer about the way Horace tinkered with our words. Most of us tried to tolerate it—he was, after all, putting out just about the best magazine in science fiction. But we hated it. It was the kind of curse that seems put upon the world to strengthen our spirit, like hemorrhoids or the torment of psoriasis.

  And then Ian gave me Star to edit, and Horace gave me the manuscript of his story, “The Man with English.”

  Cyril dropped into the office just as I was finishing reading it, and I told him what it was. Are you going to buy it? he asked. I told him I was, and he looked pensive. You know, he said, I’d like to buy a story from Horace. I’d like to buy it, and then edit it. I’d like to go over it from beginning to end, with twelve sharp pencils, and then—

  He stopped, and we looked at each other. Inspiration was born.

  So I sent Cyril out for a bottle while I had my secretary type up another copy of the script. (There were not yet Xeroxes in every office!) I prepared the new copy for the printer and sent it off, and then Cyril and I settled down to enjoy ourselves.

  Ah, the creativity of that evening! No manuscript has ever been as edited as that one. We changed the names of the characters. We changed their descriptions. If they were tall, we made them short. We gave them Irish brogues and made them stutter. We switched all the punctuation at random and killed the point of all the jokes. We mangled his sentence structure and despoiled the rolling cadence of his prose, and then we came to the point of the story. The hero of “The Man with English” has somehow had his senses switched around, so that he hears light and sees sound. At the end of the story he thinks he has had them straightened out, but then he wrinkles his nose and asks, “What smells purple?” We argued over that for half an hour, and then crossed it out and wrote in, “He said, ‘Gee, there’s a kind of a funny, you know sort of smell around here, don’t you think?’”

  And then, with great cunning, I let the manuscript be mixed in with some others intended for Horace, as if by accident, and dropped them all off at his apartment on my way home from work. And by the time I walked into my house the phone was ringing.

  If you ask Horace about it now, he will tell you, sure, he knew it was a gag all the time. Don’t you believe him. “Fred,” he said, “uh, listen. I mean—well, look, Fred. You know I’m a pro. I don’t object to editing. But…” Long pause. Then, “Jesus, Fred!” he finished.

  Well, in the long run it made no difference; Horace kept on doing what he always did, making authors weep and putting out a fine magazine. But one thing it did do. For a while one evening it made Cyril and me feel a lot better.

  First to last, I was an agent for seven years.

  Being an agent is almost like being an editor. It satisfies the god complex. John Campbell once told me that if he hadn’t been an editor he would have been either teacher or preacher, and I guess so would I. Problem-solving is always a great high. Other people’s problems are always the easiest to solve, and I enjoyed doing it. I liked taking brand-new writers like Robert Sheckley and A. J. Budrys and breaking them into top markets. I liked opening new areas for established writers—a nonfiction book condensation and then a movie sale for H. Beam Piper, their first TV assignments for James Blish and Joe Samachson. Because I got him into book writing in the first place, I am almost as pleased about Isaac Asimov’s scores of books as he is,44 and all that was fun.

  But among the great pluses I could count from my career as a literary agent, making myself rich was not one. In fact, I was running out of money. I was certain that I was on the right track. In the long run it would all pay off. But the trouble with the long run, as John Maynard Keynes is supposed to have said to Franklin D. Roosevelt, is that in the long run we are all dead. Even after I had managed to get the enterprise feebly into the black, even when I had begun doing outside editorial work and even some writing, I still was netting a lot less than I had taken home every week, headache-free, from Popular Science, and the strain was beginning to be hard to take. Among other things, it was messing up my personal life.

  After Judy and I married, we had a couple of pretty interesting years. It probably was not highly intelligent of us both to quit our well-paid jobs at the same time, but I wanted to spend more time at agenting and Judy wanted to write Shadow on the Hearth, and we took the plunge. We didn’t have much money. On the other hand, we didn’t need a lot. Our first apartment (which had been Judy’s apartment, until I moved self and typewriter in) was a basement in the East Village, about as cheap as an apartment got. It was large and rather nice—assuming you didn’t mind squeezing past the steam pipes and the laundry room to get to the door—and we had a lot of good parties there. It didn’t matter much if we were noisy, and that was good. Sometimes Jay Stanton would bring his guitar, or Ted Sturgeon would bring his. There was a piano, and usually someone to play it. Most often it was a young girl named Gerry Schuster, who was rehearsal pianist for the Ballet Theatre and once or twice brought actual dancers and choreographers around.45

  Considering how little money we had, Judy and I got around quite a lot. We made it to Toronto for the 1948 World Science Fiction Convention (the first one to take the word “world” seriously, or a little bit seriously
, by having the site actually outside the United States). George O. Smith and Chan Davis drove up to Toronto and back with us. That’s where I first met people like Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson, young fans just beginning to break into print, and on the way back George O. achieved his life’s ambition by bellying up to the rail at Niagara and urinating into the Falls. We had a summer place at Ashokan one year. We were on Cape Cod, visiting Chan Davis’s family, when the Korean War broke out. We got to the Cincinnati convention in 1949, sharing our twin beds with Chan and his new bride when they arrived too late to get a room.46 The 1950 convention was off in some unexplored area like California, and we didn’t see how we could make that, but we beat the system by holding our own convention in New York City.

  New York-1950 was the first convention I had actually participated in organizing, and if God spares my reasoning powers, it will be the last. It was a harrowing experience.

  By now there have been hundreds of conventions. There is a great body of accumulated wisdom, passed on from committee to committee. Hotels have become aware of sf conventions and usually welcome them, sometimes compete furiously to attract them. But in 1950 there was much ground still unbroken. Hotel managers were not at all sure of what they were getting into; they wanted guarantees. Registration fees were modest. No one had yet thought of converting sf conventions into Farmer’s Markets for hucksters of books, magazines, and trinkets, so there was no income from renting out sales space. There wasn’t very much money at all to work with, and certainly none to pay speakers. Nevertheless, we got several hundred people out, and all in all, it was one of the best conventions of the decade.

  It even attracted media coverage. Life sent a crew around, and published a group photograph of the banquet. The saddening thing about the photo, looking at it now, is that so many of the people are dead: Willy Ley, Will Jenkins (a.k.a. Murray Leinster), my old boss George Spoerer, Rita Pringle (Dirk Wylie’s sister-in-law; Dirk himself had died a year or two earlier), Jim Williams of Prime Press. The other saddening thing, or at least the sort of rueful thing, is to observe how many of the couples there are couples no longer, or are coupled with different partners. My wife, Carol, is in the picture, but not only were we not yet married, we had barely met.