The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  Working with Horace was always a challenge, sometimes delightful and stimulating, sometimes with a lot of screaming at each other. He personalized the editorial function more than any other person I have ever known, even John Campbell, who sometimes seemed ordained by God to sit at a desk and tell people how to write their stories. With Horace, editing involved every aspect of his personality. Editing was not only what he did, it was what he was.

  Horace was a medium-tallish, mostly baldish, and slightly plumpish sort of person. He never left his apartment. He made the world come to him. When it was unwilling to do so, he pursued it on the phone. Most of his dealings with writers were telephonic, so that wherever you were, at whatever time, the phone might ring. There would be Horace on the other end, lying on his back on his bed with cigarettes and ashtray at one hand and your manuscript in the other, ready for as long and complicated a talk as was needful to get you to do what he wanted.

  Horace’s phone bills must have been immense, and so was his determination. He knew what he wanted.

  Horace’s battle to substitute his own conception of a story for the writer’s caused fury and frustration. But, my God, the stories he got! Sheckley, Knight, Kornbluth, Leiber, Bester, Sturgeon, Tenn, and fifty others never wrote better than when they were writing for Horace Gold’s Galaxy. He took mediocre writers and made them at least momentarily pretty good. He took good writers and stretched them as far as they would go. He wasn’t always right in what he asked for. Sometimes he was terribly wrong. That didn’t really matter. The creative synthesis of the dialectic was at work; in the struggle between Horace-yin and writer-yang something came out that was better than either could have achieved alone.

  If Horace had a failing as an editor, it was that when a perfectly good story came along his responses faltered. He had no way to improve it, and sometimes he rejected it. He turned down a couple of my best I think. He also turned down Jim Blish’s A Case of Conscience and Danny Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon and—well, quite a few good ones. That didn’t really matter, either. While Horace was in swing, Galaxy was where the action was.

  Apart from editorial dealings, of course, we were friends, Horace and Evelyn and Carol and I. When we lived nearby we saw each other frequently. When Carol and I moved to New Jersey, not as often, but we still kept in touch.

  As our lives began to settle down, Carol and I decided that having a child of hers and one of mine wasn’t quite enough, and so we opted for one of ours. Horace was delighted, called anxiously all through the pregnancy, and was the first person I phoned when our son, Frederik Pohl III, was born in the cold November of 1954.

  He was a big, strong, beautiful baby. He came home from the hospital with a slight cold, or something of the sort. The pediatrician thought it would clear up quickly. It didn’t. He became seriously ill, and then, very quickly, he died.

  If I could go back and rewrite my life with the privilege of editing out one experience, that is the one I would pick to obliterate. Even now I cannot think of it without rage and pain. Friends tried to console us with the promise that as time went by we would forget. They lied. The only thing that happened was that the pain receded and became bearable. Even that took a long, long time.

  What made the world begin to look promising again, fifteen months later, was the birth of another son, to whom we gave the name Frederik Pohl IV. Since he is now a man grown, I dare not say what I would like to say about his infancy, because he would have my heart out. But when he came into the house the world brightened. Rick was born in January, 1956. Cyril and I were just finishing a novel called Presidential Year. We were into the last chapter when Carol announced that it was time; I took her to the hospital, came back, wrote the final pages of the novel just as the phone rang to announce the birth. I am not so enslaved to writing discipline that I would do that sort of thing as a matter of course. With Presidential Year we didn’t really have a choice. It was about—well, it was about a Presidential Year, which 1956 was; if we wanted it out in time to do anything, we had to get it to the printer.

  In the event, the novel was only a marginal success. It sold a reasonable number of copies, got some friendly reviews, and earned a little movie money. That was it. It is more or less irrelevant to these radically different post-Watergate political days, and so I have to call it at best a passable accomplishment; but the son was a triumph.

  Presidential Year was written for Ian’s Ballantine Books, as were more than half the books I have written for anyone in my life so far.58

  By 1956 Ian had gone through a burst of opening splendor, a fairly catastrophic fallback, and a return to reasonable prosperity. The thing about Ian as a publisher was that he couldn’t help seeing the authors’ side of it. When he started, every paperback company in the United States was paying 4 percent royalty to its authors. Ian decided to pay eight. Every other paperback publisher was sticking pretty close to Westerns, mysteries, and best-seller fiction. Ian chose to let his writers try new things. He was not only a publisher but a friend, and he was something else, too. Ian was my bank. When the well ran dry I would go to Ian and say, “More money, please, sir.” And he would give me an advance on some future book, not only not written but not even thought out yet in my head.

  For all those reasons Ian Ballantine became my principal publisher and stayed so as long as he was head of the company that bears his name. I am not sure whether this was wise or not. There is a limit to how many books by one writer any publisher can keep in print. If the writer is Joseph Heller, publishing a book every eighteen years or so, that is one thing. If the writer is Isaac Asimov, or Robert Silverberg at his most fertile, emitting books every twenty-eight days as the moon grows full—a little blood and a few days’ discomfort, and there’s the book—obviously no publisher in the world is going to keep up with him. If the writer is somewhere in between, like me, then the problem is hard to solve. My trouble is that I have monogamous instincts. Flitting from publisher to publisher has always seemed sort of vaguely promiscuous. So I had an adolescent fling with Gnome Press, and an occasional dalliance with Doubleday, and a few one-night stands here and there, but then it was back to hearth, home, and Ballantine Books.

  As Ballantine with books, so Galaxy with serial rights was my main outlet, but there I was even more often led astray. There were so many magazines!

  Some were edited by old and good friends, for whom I really wanted to write. When Bob Lowndes’s science-fiction magazines at Columbia Publications were shot down by the war, he stayed on as general editor of the pulp group. As science fiction began looking good again, he revived them. Bob is a skilled editor, particularly in dealing with some kinds of writers, and although his rates were seldom competitive with the top of the field, he put together attractive magazines. Larry Shaw, who had briefly been one of my employees during my agency days, became editor of Jim Quinn’s magazine If, in Kingston, New York. Leo Margulies, once head honcho for Thrilling Wonder et al., started a new magazine called Fantastic Universe. Out in Chicago, Ray Palmer left Amazing Stories to start his own science-fiction magazine. The magazines swelled tall in fairy circles after every rain, thirty-odd separate titles on the stands at one time. Although I was writing a hundred thousand words a year, I couldn’t appear in all of them. But I gave it a royal try.

  Then, suddenly, it was harvest time. The magazines fell like threshed wheat.

  A lot of them, of course, were well ripe for obliteration, put together in a hurry by people who knew nothing of science fiction, printing derivative yard goods and living off the reputations of their better brethren. But some of the good ones fell, too. Bad science fiction hurts good. The in-and-out readers who have not yet developed a major habit don’t always distinguish between magazines—or between authors, either—and if the last two or three sf books or magazines they’ve read have displeased them, it may be a while before they buy any more science fiction at all.

  But that was not the major reason for the collapse. What did them all in so massiv
ely and fast was the sale of the American News Company.

  I think I have to explain what the American News Company was. It was a nationwide distributor. When a publisher brings out a magazine or a line of paperbacks, he does not walk down to your corner newsstand to put them in the racks. He employs intermediaries for that purpose: a national distributor who in turn supplies a large number of local wholesalers, six or eight hundred sizable ones in the United States.

  American News had its own local wholesalers in every community. They were not a monopoly. There were a dozen or more other national distributors, collectively called “the Independents.” They jointly supplied another complete network of local wholesalers, so that in every community there were two sources from which newsdealers got their publications: the ANC wholesaler, and the wholesaler for the Independents. ANC was big, mighty, and old. It had been around so long that over the years it had acquired all sorts of valuable real property. Land. Buildings. Restaurants. Franchises. Items of considerable cash value, acquired when time was young and everything was cheap, and still carried on their books at the pitiful acquisition costs of 1890 or 1910. A stock operator took note of all this and observed that if you bought up all the outstanding stock in ANC (a publicly held corporation) at prevailing prices, you would have acquired an awful lot of valuable real estate at, really, only a few cents on the dollar. It was as profitable as buying dollar bills for fifty cents each. And it was legal.

  So he did. He bought a controlling interest and liquidated the company.

  Now, all this is perfectly legal. It is even common. It may seem strange that you can buy dollar bills for fifty cents each in this way, but that’s because most of us still believe in the legends we were taught at our mothers’ knees: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the validity of the pricing mechanisms of the Free Market. Let’s have a short multiple-choice quiz:

  Q. What does the price of a share of stock reflect?

  Its proportionate value of the assets of the corporation?

  The expectation of future earnings?

  The growth expectations of the corporation?

  The security of the investment?

  A. None of the above.

  What the price of a share reflects is nothing more or less than the state of mind of the people who buy it.

  The New York Stock Exchange is basically a big parimutuel machine which balances off optimism and gloom.59 When optimism is high, the price goes up. When optimism goes down, the price does, too. Investors do not really know what they are doing, you know. During the excitement of the early days of commercial air transport, thousands of them spent millions of dollars to get in on the ground floor by buying a stock called Seaboard Airways. (It turned out to be a railroad.) And more recently, remember the misery of all the wise old institutional investors who bought gold.

  So there was old American News, ripe for the scavenging, and it was scavenged. The operator bought up a controlling interest, sold off everything that could be sold, and liquidated the concern. He made quite a nice couple of capital-gains bucks out of it all, and in the process American News Company ceased to exist.

  Oh, the panic, the terror! All the magazines that had been distributed by ANC now had no way to get their next issues on the newsstands!

  The publishers came running to the offices of the various Independents, hats in hands, tears in their eyes. Most of them were turned down flat. There was just so much volume that each Independent was capable of handling, and they picked and chose. Life and Time they were glad to take. But who wanted to bother with some bimonthly pulp about spaceships and monsters? Especially if the publisher was rather inadequately financed and in the habit of hitting up his distributors for advances to pay the printers?

  This period in history is referred to by scholars as “the final solution to the sf magazine boom,” and, one by one, they went to the gas ovens. Some were spared, of course. The luckiest of the lot was Galaxy. Horace Gold had heard rumblings and warned Bob Guinn only a matter of months before that it was time to move. So he had taken his business from ANC to one of the Independents just before the stock shuffle began, and in the panic that followed, Bob could look on with compassion and complacency because he already had his contracts for distribution signed.

  But for the others—a score of them, at least—R.I.P. Their like shall not come this way again.

  All was not smooth sailing for Galaxy, however. It did have a problem. The problem was the health of its editor, H. L. Gold.

  Like Cyril Kornbluth and Dirk Wylie, Horace had come out of World War II as a disabled veteran.

  For a man officially described as “disabled,” Horace was fantastically able. In his dealings with writers, agents, artists, printers, and all the other fauna of the publishing environment, his problems did not slow him down for a second. What he could not accomplish by phone he managed by mail. When letters failed, he persuaded the people he needed to see to come to his apartment in Stuyvesant Town.

  It did cost him. There were times when he would have five or six people visiting him at once, and abruptly they would be too many. Horace would retreat to the hall, looking into the room where everyone else was gathered; a part of the conversation, saying everything that needed to be said, but shielded by the doorframe. There were times when anxiety made decision-making unpleasant, then difficult, now and then impossible.

  Editing a magazine is no easy spot for a person who second-guesses his decisions. There is a go or no-go decision to be made on every manuscript, a hundred times a week, not to mention all the serial decisions that go into the big ones.

  When he could, he would ask writers and other friends for help. Groff Conklin did a great deal to assist; so did Evelyn Gold, Horace’s wife. More and more he came to me. He would save up the slush-pile manuscripts until they filled every drawer of a bureau in his bedroom. Then he would ask me to deal with them, and I would take them away, a suitcase-full at a time. What I liked I would return to him with appropriate comments—“Buy this one,” “Tell him it needs cutting,” “The scene beginning on page nineteen kills the point of the story”—whatever. What I didn’t like I stuck a rejection slip on and dropped in the mail.

  It is not uncommon for an editor to have someone to do his preliminary reading for him. I’ve never done it myself, but then I was lucky enough to be able to read fast. In the late 1950s Horace began to go beyond that. At times he asked me to “ghost” the magazine for him: do all the reading, all the buying and bouncing, all the preparation of the magazine for the printer, all the writing of blurbs and house ads and editorials.

  None of this was any sweat for me, really. If anything, I looked on the chance to edit a magazine again as a pleasant vacation from the reality of pounding the typewriter for a living.

  Between times Horace functioned as always, acerbic, quick, opinionated. He had lost faith with all the orthodox procedures for dealing with his problems and began about then to devise his own therapy. At least twenty times he offered to share it with me, but I wanted no part of it. I did not see that I had any problems that needed psychotherapy at all. (Vanity, vanity!)

  It is my personal opinion that any therapy sometimes produces benefits, probably on the analogy of kicking the Model T to see if it will start itself running. Horace’s did—at least temporarily, at least now and then, at least for some people. One of them was Horace himself. He made it out of his apartment now, at first experimentally, late at night; often I would come by in my car and pick him up, and we would drive around New York, stopping now and then to let him get out and walk and stretch his limits. Then he began to go out on his own, or with others, sometimes for a weekend.

  Then, on one of his excursions, he was injured in a taxi smash.

  Together with the other threats to his health, his injuries were more than he could stand. He began to lose weight. Horace is medium height, normally rather solidly built. A hundred and seventy pounds would be a good weight for him. He dropped down close to a hundred. He could not
eat. He was in constant pain. And toward the end of 1960 it became clear that his life was in danger, and that he was simply too ill to continue with the magazine, or indeed with any activity not directly aimed at getting him better.

  With Horace’s approval I went downtown to see Bob Guinn, the publisher of Galaxy, offering to fill in for Horace on a temporary basis until things clarified themselves.

  Bob hemmed and hawed a little bit. He had had ten years of an editor who never came into the office, and if there was going to be any change, he would have liked it to be in the direction of someone who would be where he could be watched forty hours a week. Well, this is against my religion. I said, as a concession, that I would be willing to come in maybe once a week, at least for part of a day, but that was as far as I could go; Bob mulled it over for a day or two and then called me up to say he agreed.

  I stayed with Galaxy for just about a decade. The pay was miserable. The work was never-ending. It was the best job I ever had in my life.

  49 These particular pages, for instance, were written early on a Saturday morning in a hotel room in Cleveland, Ohio. Chip Delany was right across the hall. Joe and Gay Haldeman, Annie McCaffrey, Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, and other boon companions were only a few doors away, and I was certain, absolutely, despondently certain, that they were all getting ready to have a fun brunch, laughing and chortling and having a hell of a great old time, while I was slaving away on my decrepit French portable. But I stuck it out and postponed collapse for one more day.