The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  50 You probably have noticed by now that I am fond of my kids, but all this is objectively true, I swear.

  51 Not just in science fiction. His Ordeal by Fire is the best one-volume history of the Civil War ever written, and taught me most of what I know about the writing of nonfiction.

  52 “Any prime number can be written as the sum of two primes.” It’s true, as far as anyone knows. But prove it?

  53 That is, some mathematical formula into which you can substitute arbitrary numbers on the left-hand side of the equation, and for which the solution on the right-hand side will always be a prime number. I still think that one can be solved, but I no longer think it will be by me.

  54 I wound up with three quarters of a million words of notes and about fifty thousand words of the text of what was called Say, Don’t You Remember? But while I was doing that, several other people noticed the need for such a book and beat me into print.

  55 I would like to pay him honor by mentioning his name. But I did that once, on the air, and he was far from pleased. He said that within forty-eight hours a dozen regular customers began asking for credit, and would I please not ever do that again?

  56 Gladiator-at-Law, Bantam Books.

  57 Also dropped from the book version. Working with Cyril, by the way, was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. If I say comparatively little about it here, it is because I have already said a great deal about it in three other books, The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (Ballantine), Critical Mass (Bantam), and Before the Universe (Bantam).

  58 I don’t really know how many books there are. I used to. I used to write the title and date of every new book on the wall of my office as they came out. Then Carol painted the wall. The total is somewhere around a hundred, give or take half a dozen or so.

  59 See Gladiator-at-Law, by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Bantam Books.

  10

  The Finest Job in the World

  In the middle of the 1960s, while I was editor of Galaxy and its satellites, I visited one of my writers at his regular place of employment. His name was L. J. Stecher, and what he did for a living was command the United States Navy guided-missile cruiser Columbus. The ship was tied up in the North River, a mean-looking low gray shape with threatening projections sticking out all over the deck, and when I came to keep our appointment, the Marine guard advised me to get lost. There were no visitors, and no exceptions. I mentioned tentatively that I had been invited by the captain. The Marine came to a Parris Island brace and said no more as he sped me on my way.

  Lew took me around his ship with obvious love and pride. I am no fan of armaments. I would see every navy vessel in the world at the bottom of the Pacific if I had my druthers, except for a few light gunboats to keep the dolphin murderers and whale killers in line. But the Columbus was a mighty impressive machine. Those sticky-out things on the decks launched nuclear missiles. Those hooded electric-fan shapes radared the world. The fire-control room was fancier and science-fictiony-er than the bridge of the starship Enterprise. From it, in time of battle, Lew could dispose enough muscle for his one ship, all alone, to have reversed the outcome of any sea battle in the history of the world.

  We went back to his quarters, past the Marine guard. We were served a modest dinner by his mess orderly and chatted for a while, partly about the stories Lew had been writing for me, mostly about his ship. There were stars in his eyes when he talked about it. He said at last, “You know, I wouldn’t change my job for any other job in the world.”

  I thought for a minute and said, “You know, neither would I.”

  From 1960 to 1969 I was the editor of Galaxy and its companion publications. Being an editor is not everyone’s cup of tea. In the plate tectonics of the literary world, the place where the editor sits is right at the crunch. The Creative Integrity plate of the writer subducts under the Money-Market Morality plate of the publisher—or the other way around—and mountain ranges are thrown up, laws carven in granite are squeezed into fiery soup, and the flesh-and-blood creature who lives in the interface needs a lot of agility to keep from being maimed. An editor is a clearinghouse for pressures. The printers want their deadlines met. The publisher wants a profit. The writers want—oh, God, what do they not want? An audience. The perfect freedom to say whatever it is they want to say. Cosseting. Coddling. Respect. And money. The agents want money. (And their writers kept off their backs.) The distributors want a product that sells itself. The advertisers want customers. The readers want—well, everything; and no two of them want quite the same everything. The artists, the assistants, the space salesmen, the columnists, the local distributors, the convention committees, the pressure groupies—all of them want something, and there isn’t enough of everything to go around, and it is usually the editor who has to grant this and withhold that, steal a day on a printing deadline so an author can finish his third installment, spend a dollar more on a story and take it away from a cover artist, placate a reader who thinks there’s too much smut in a story and calm down the writer who thinks too much of the smut has been edited out. I have said that all editors are crazy. Now you know why. The pressures precipitate psychosis, and anyway, nobody but a crazy person would take a job like that in the first place, especially at pitiful money. Which is what most editors of science-fiction magazines get.

  But I loved it. I love it still. I have grown accustomed to a lot more solvency as a writer than I ever had from editing Galaxy, but if some sweet-talking devil came by tomorrow with an interesting proposition for a new science-fiction magazine, I would find it very hard to say no.

  The great thing about being a science-fiction magazine editor, at least for me, is that it does so feed the vanity. I am sorry to have to admit to this character flaw in myself, but there it is. Those who are repelled by the sight of a naked ego will do us all a great favor by skipping the next paragraph, because in it I propose to brag:

  In the decade of the 1960s I published a lot of science-fiction stories, by a lot of writers. Among them was nearly every writer of any importance in the field. For many of the best, I published all or most of the work written in that decade: Robert A. Heinlein, Cordwainer Smith, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, R. A. Lafferty, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and a lot of others. Many of the stories, including many of the best, would never have been written if I hadn’t encouraged, coaxed, and sometimes browbeaten the authors. And they were mostly pretty good stories. This is, of course, my subjective opinion. But I think it’s right.60

  The man I worked for was Robert Guinn. He was not really a publisher. He was a printing broker. Publishing was a sideline, operated out of one corner of his office on Hudson Street, down where the trucks line up to head for the Holland Tunnel and New Jersey.

  Bob Guinn was an easy person to like. He had a salesman’s professional affability, but he also had innate intelligence. He did not always use his smarts in ways that I liked, or his affability, either. What Bob was really great at was reading a balance sheet, and he kept perceiving ways in which we could pay a little less and acquire a little more, all of which it was my duty to resist. And when I came to him with proposals for paying a little more and demanding a little less, his affability took over and he would remember eight new dirty jokes to tell me. So we tangled from time to time, now and then with a certain amount of yelling. But as far as what went into the magazines was concerned, he left me alone to do what I wanted. And that was what I wanted.

  All science-fiction magazines had been going through hard times, partly as the result of the post-American News comb-out. Galaxy was at a low point. It had been cut back to bimonthly publication a year or two earlier, and the word rate had been slashed. Once it had paid a three-cent minimum, averaging maybe three and a quarter. Now the average was down around a cent and a half. If, which Bob Guinn had picked up for small money when its Kingston publisher, James Quinn, got tired of it, had been bimonthly for a long time and was paying even less: flat penny a word, take it or leave it. Even at that, both we
re barely squeaking by.

  I didn’t like either word rates or the frequency. The proper publication schedule for a science-fiction magazine is every month, and don’t argue with me, because I don’t know why I am so sure of it. But I am. As to the word rates, John Campbell was paying Galaxy’s old prices, three cents per and now and then a little more. I didn’t feel I needed to be able to outbid John to get what I wanted, but I did need to be within striking distance. So my first two objectives were to get the rates and frequencies back where they belonged. When I explained this to Bob Guinn, he listened attentively, smiled comprehendingly, told me three quick dirty jokes, and gave me his considered opinion. “Forget it,” he said.

  If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that there is always a way to do whatever needs doing. All you have to do is find it. So I considered the options. Possibly I could cut the number of pages, and use the savings to pay more to the writers. But there was always the chance that Bob would say, sure, let’s cut the pages and keep the savings. Besides, I liked having a lot of pages to play with. Or I might cut back on the art budget, or run a long (and free) letter column. Or—inspiration struck. I went over the inventories to see how much we already owned and how much we had paid for it. Horace and I between us, it turned out, had accumulated quite a few low-rate stories. I decided to accumulate some more. I went through all the submitted manuscripts on hand (there was a fairish backlog) and found a hundred thousand words or so that I liked reasonably well, without being in love with: the sort of story one is not ashamed to publish, but can face losing without distress. I made the authors low-rate offers on all of these, and most of the offers were accepted. Then I formally announced Galaxy’s return to the three-cent minimum, effective at once. By diluting the three-cent material with that handsome reserve of cheaper stuff, I could maintain an average per-issue cost well within the budget and still pay competitive rates for everything new I bought. That would last six issues, I calculated, and by then I would be prepared to fight it out with Bob for a budget increase.

  What I wanted was to get first look at most of the uncommitted new material by the pros. In the long run I wanted more than that. I wanted first look at most of the amateur stuff, too, and I also wanted to loosen some of the pros’ commitments to Analog, F&SF, and all, but I had other, slower-acting strategies in mind for those efforts.

  The money was only Step One in the campaign. Speed of reporting was almost as important, and so I made my first order of business every week to read and respond to the incoming manuscripts, not only the professional submissions but the slush pile as well. It was easy to beat out the competition in that arena. John Campbell ordinarily took a month or more to report. Horace had sometimes been far slower than that. Most of the other magazines had a two-tier system, preliminary reader and then editor; I did all my own reading, and I did it fast, and for at least ninety-five percent of the manuscripts either a buy or a bounce was on its way within forty-eight hours of the time I first saw the script. Of course, most were bounces. I trained my secretaries and assistants, when I had any, to open all incoming manuscripts, put a rejection slip on each one, and put it in an envelope stamped and addressed to go back to the writer. In the event I bought the story, that effort was wasted. But that only happened to one manuscript in twenty or fewer; and for all the others I could read them in the train on my way home to Red Bank and drop them off in the mailbox at the station when I arrived.

  Of course, there was more to it than that, but just that much gave me a crack at more than half the stories I wanted. Nothing works perfectly. Some good stories slipped through my net. When they were good enough to make me covetous, I tried to let the author, or his agent, know how I felt, hoping that the next one would come my way.

  Once or twice I lost out on a story I really had every right to expect, and that was painful. Cordwainer Smith was one of my favorite writers. He was also a recluse, who didn’t want too much contact with the science-fiction world, but we had become friends and he had voluntarily promised to give me first look at everything he wrote. Unfortunately, he had taken on an agent. The agent was willing to live by Paul’s61 commitments, but he also had certain standard rules of procedure. One was that he never under any circumstances submitted two stories by the same writer to an editor at one time. When Paul happened to finish two scripts on the same day and sent them off to the agent in the same envelope, the agent sent me the one he liked best and mailed the other off to Fantasy and Science Fiction. By the time I found out about it, they had already accepted it, which is why I didn’t get to publish “On Alpha-Ralpha Boulevard”; but I then persuaded that agent to change that rule.

  It was Galaxy that I was trying to make the leader in the field again. If was only a stepsister, but I had a good use for it. Most writers are in-and-outers, something good and then a few that are not so good. The best ones I wanted for Galaxy. The others I didn’t. It’s hard to deal with that sort of writer when you have only one magazine. You can’t publish everything without sacrificing overall quality. But you know perfectly well (assuming the author is as good as you think he is) that someone else will publish the ones you turn down. There is always the risk that the suitor who soothes his feelings by buying the one you bounced will win him away with the next good one, too. If, with its lower rate, gave me a perfect dumping ground for the stories I didn’t want to print in Galaxy but didn’t want anyone else to have, either. If was also a good place to try out new talent.

  There were, at least in my head, significant policy differences between the two magazines. Good gray Galaxy was the class leader. It paid a lot more for what it published, and took a lot more planning and care. Galaxy was edited for the mature, sophisticated science-fiction reader. If you could read only one magazine in the field but wanted to be au courant parfaitement, Galaxy was the magazine to read.

  If was for the younger reader, and the newer, and the less involved. Editing If was almost recreational. If I had a whim not solid enough to call an inspiration, I tried it in If. In terms of literary quality and significance, I have no doubt that Galaxy was a better magazine than If, but If was a lot easier to turn around. It was cheaper to produce. Its budget was lower. It had less of a distinguished history for the readers to compare the current product against. I was able to make If show a profit long before Galaxy did.

  And it was If that caught the fancy of the readers. What was fun for me seemed to be fun for them. Or maybe it was for another reason.

  Early on I was sitting with another editor at a world convention banquet when Hugo time came around. He picked up the best-editor trophy. I was as generously congratulatory as my mean little envious spirit would allow. He mumbled something, glowered at his coffee cup for a while, and then leaned over and whispered in my ear: “You know, considering how little I’ve done on the magazine the past couple of years, it begins to look like the less I do the better the readers like it.” It was almost the same with me. I never won a Hugo for Galaxy, but I won three in a row for its little stepsister, If.

  By the time my stores of cheap stories were running low, the magazines were showing signs of returning financial health. I hit Bob up for a budget increase. He smiled and tousled my hair and told me six dirty jokes. I came back to it the next week, and the week after, and when he had used up all the dirty jokes he knew, he gave in. Sweet Old Bob! I always called him that. Or sometimes just the initials.

  The next step was to make the magazines monthly, and that was a whole nother story. Alarmed by the fact that he had lost the battle of the budget, Bob summoned up reinforcements.

  The thing about Bob Guinn was that he knew he wasn’t a publisher, and so he decided to hire a publisher to do the job for him. Now, this will seem strange to many writers and editors. What job? they will ask. What is it that a publisher does do?

  I can understand this confusion, because I have worked for and with a lot of publishers in my day, and I am still not sure exactly what it is that some of them were doing. One used to lock
himself in his 16' × 28' office every morning and read comics. Another spent his first year of incumbency in taking every single employee off the job he was doing and putting him on some other job, so that no one in the office but he would know exactly what was going on. Another spent his time padding down the office corridors and peering in at each desk to make sure the person was sitting there. Another was hired, I think, mostly to yell. There are some great creative publishers in the world—Oscar Dystel and Ian Ballantine are the two I see the most of—but there are also hell’s own herd of turkeys.

  Nevertheless, there are certain publishing functions which have to be done. They aren’t fun or glamour things, but they make an immense difference to the success of a publication. In large corporations they are divided among a multitude of departments, and the publisher’s main function is as a sort of KP-pusher, making sure that everybody does his job and knocking heads together when needed. Galaxy Publishing Corporation was nothing like that. The editorial, promotion, publicity, and advertising departments were combined into one person, me. That left out a lot of nitty-gritty, mostly production and distribution. Production is a matter of seeing that type is set and paper is on hand and copies are printed and bound. That was Bob’s area of special expertise as a printing broker, anyway, so there was no problem in leaving that to him. Distribution is concerned with keeping the national distributor on his toes, checking his draw-and-return figures to see that copies of the publication are going more or less where they might be bought instead of to six all-night delicatessens in LaPorte, Indiana. Bob was less good at that, but even so, better than I was.