The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  Dealing with distributors is not the most fun there is. The standards of the trade are higher now than they used to be, but there was a time when your average local wholesaler had got most of his training in the newspaper circulation business, in the days when the standard ploy for bettering your sales was to tip over the other fellow’s delivery trucks. One national distributor of a few years ago was run by a troika. Two of them had served time in prison, and the other had got his start peddling pirated song sheets, I took a couple of local wholesalers to a science-fiction convention once and showed them the costume ball. One femme fan had a lovely butterfly costume, weeks of painful sewing and a lot of creative thought; the two wholesalers showed their first signs of interest when she came by. One said, “Hey, I like that,” and the other said, “Me, too. Will she fuck?”

  Bob was not too rarefied a soul to be exposed to such crudities, but even he came back from some excursions into distribution with horror on his face. There was a large newsstand near his summer home; it sold six or eight hundred copies of The New York Times every Sunday…and two copies of Galaxy every month. Bob suggested to the dealer that he ask for more. The dealer said he had, dozens of times. The two copies he did get he kept under the counter for regular customers, and he was sure he could sell plenty more. But the distributors would not be bothered. So Bob took fifty copies out of the warehouse and put them in the back of the car, and the dealer put them on his shelves. And forty-six of them sold. And so Bob went triumphantly to the wholesaler and said, “See? Why don’t you ship them fifty copies every issue now?” And the distributor said (paraphrasing out some of the more colorful parts), “Why, no, Mr. Guinn, I wouldn’t care to do that, and because of that dealer’s presumption we won’t ship him any copies of Galaxy at all any more.”

  Well. That was a while ago, and the elder statesmen of the distribution business have now largely retired to their villas outside Palermo. The new generation is a lot easier to get along with. But still it is no job for an amateur.

  So when Bob proposed to employ a professional publisher, I was all for it. In due course into the office came Sol Cohen, former VP at Avon Books, recently retired with enough capital-gains on his stock participation to be in little need of employment, but not ready to quit working entirely.

  I spent a lot of time with Sol over the next couple of years. He has strengths and weaknesses. In the right place he would be a valuable natural resource for a publishing company. I don’t think Galaxy was the right place. The size of the numbers involved was an order of magnitude smaller than he was used to. His experience was with paperback books, rather than with magazines. And he had much too much interest in the editorial aspects of the business to suit me. We had that out early. After a few tentative engagements he never interfered with my editorial decisions on the magazines but took out his ambitions on side ventures: a series of anthologies for a small paperback house; a book-magazine hybrid of our own called “Magabook,” which struggled through a couple of issues but never really got off the ground. What he did do was spend a lot of time with the distributor, which I welcomed a lot. What I welcomed less was that on any major changes of policy I now had two people to convince instead of one.

  My big remaining ambition was to make both Galaxy and If monthly. I had totally failed to persuade one person. Confronting two was disheartening. But I wanted it too much to accept defeat. While both magazines were in the red I could see that it wasn’t a good idea to lose twice as much by bringing one of them out twice as often. But then, when If struggled its way into the black, I announced that it was now time to switch it over to a monthly schedule. “Oh really?” said Bob, and “That’s a big step, Fred,” said Sol; and the two of them went off and conferred. They came back with the decision that it wasn’t a good idea to mess with a profitable proposition by making a change in frequency, either. Oh, shit, I said, look! If you don’t want to go monthly when it’s losing because it’s losing, and don’t want to go monthly when it’s making because it’s making, then when, pray, is the time when one does go monthly? They admitted that was a good question. They talked it over for another eternity or two and then, reluctantly, agreed to roll the dice for an experimental period. We’ll make If monthly for six months, they said. No promises beyond that! If it’s doing all right at the end of the six months, we’ll keep it up. If not, back to bimonthly and no more arguments. Fine, said I, my heart singing.

  That meeting took place in the afternoon of the last Thursday in August of 1962. I know the date well, because the next day I was to leave for the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago. In fact, that was why I had pressed the issue at that time. What I was trying to do was to generate and maintain momentum. I had bumped the rates, improved relations with a lot of writers, got some talk going, acquired some significant stories. The next thing I wanted was to be able to tell that convention that If was going to be monthly again. Happy as I knew how to be, I went home and packed, collected Carol, caught a plane, and arrived in Chicago to find a telegram waiting at the hotel:

  ON NO ACCOUNT MENTION POSSIBLE MONTHLY SCHEDULE FOR IF PENDING FINAL DECISION.

  SOL

  “Possible” monthly publication? I got on the phone. But by then, of course, it was Labor Day weekend. I couldn’t reach either Sol or Bob to ask them what the hell they thought they were playing at. When the convention was over and I was back in New York, I found out: they had got to thinking after I left. And they had chickened out.

  I’ve said that Bob and I got along well most of the time, barring occasional yelling. That was one of the times for yelling.

  Although I had been talking about it for months, I think they had never really perceived how important it was to me. They thought it over for a while and then decided to placate me. Look, said Bob (or Sol), we’re just scared to make a move with either If or Galaxy. We’re sorry we are, but we are. But if you’re all that ape-shit for a monthly magazine, we’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll start a third magazine for you. We’ll make that one monthly.

  That took me aback. The last thing I wanted right then was another magazine. It seems to me that a magazine, any magazine, is or at least ought to be a living creature. It should have a personality and an identity of its own. Not part of a litter; an individual. I was a long way from attaining that with either of the two magazines I already had.

  On the other hand, my bluff was called. It was an offer I could not turn down. I figured, fuzzily enough, that maybe I could start the new one and make it work as a monthly, then merge it with, say, If. I would insist on maintaining the monthly schedule with the new composite, I dreamed; and then, when that had been shown to work, it would be easy enough to get Galaxy back up there, too…

  So I accepted the deal and got to work. We picked out a title: Worlds of Tomorrow. We designed a logo. I bought the stories. We signed a distribution contract. We sent the first issue off to the printer…

  By then I was beginning to see flaws in my rosy reasoning. Suppose it did work as a monthly. I had had no luck at all in getting Bob and Sol to change the frequency of If or Galaxy. Just what would be my chances of getting them to kill a moneymaker in order to merge it with another book?

  But in the long run it didn’t matter. The problem never came up. By the time Worlds of Tomorrow came out, Bob and Sol had had another failure of nerve. The test project designed to establish the potential of monthly publication, too, was a bimonthly.62

  Worlds of Tomorrow lasted several years, and even published some pretty good stories that I might not have been able to get into either If or Galaxy. In order to distinguish it from the rest of the herd, I had decided to feature long, complete-in-one-issue seminovels, and there were some fine ones by Gordon R. Dickson, Philip K. Dick, and others. But I had also decided to try to include some material on extrapolative science—not exactly fact, but not exactly science fiction, either. They were, I thought, among the best things in the magazine. We had a series on future weaponry written by someone who kn
ew the subject so well that he could not use his own name. And we had freezing.

  Shortly after the magazine was born, I found in the slush pile something that was not exactly a manuscript. It was a privately printed, spiral-bound book called The Prospect of Immortality, by someone called Robert C. W. Ettinger.

  One of the interesting fringe benefits of a career in science fiction is that one gets to hear from a lot of geniuses, and from a lot of nuts. It is not always easy to tell at first encounter which is which. I looked at the book without much enthusiasm. Then, as I began to read it, Ettinger began to come through as a person who had had a wild idea that might—that just possibly might—really work.

  The argument of the book was easy enough to follow:

  If you wanted to live forever, there was at least a reasonable hope that the technology to make that possible was already at hand. By following certain simple directions, you might never die—or, more accurately, if you did die now and then, it needn’t be fatal.

  How was this to be achieved?

  By means of the deepfreeze, said Ettinger. Go ahead and live your life. Die when you have to. Then, at the moment of death, have your body popped into a freezer. A cold freezer, around the temperature of liquid nitrogen, maybe even liquid helium. You could keep an organic substance—including your very dear own personal body—at liquid-gas temperatures without essential change for a long time. No physical change. No chemical change. No chemical processes taking place at all, except for a little free-radical activity, glacially slow and not to be worried about. There might be a touch of radiation damage from prolonged exposure to cosmic rays—but not quickly. Not for days, weeks, months, or centuries. Perhaps not even for millions of years.

  And this, said Ettinger, was not theory, it was scientific fact.

  That was one of the two bases his plan rested on. The other was not exactly a fact, but it certainly seemed at least a good gambling bet. That was that medical science would continue to learn. Sooner or later, Ettinger said, doctors would know how to do three things at present difficult or impossible: (1) how to cure or repair whatever damage had killed you in the first place; (2) how to repair whatever additional damage had been done to your body by the freezing process itself—mostly cellular damage from the phase-change of water to ice; (3) how to start you up again (as we now are able to start up again people who through drowning or electroshock or heart arrest would once have been buried instead). All this might take some time, he conceded. But dreaming away in the deepfreeze, time was what you had plenty of.

  Was this science fiction or a real hope? Did it mean that some real person now in the agony of terminal cancer could really have some expectation, however slim, of living once more in health and comfort?

  I was no authority on any of these subjects. I am no real authority on most subjects, for that matter; but the nature of an editorial job is that ignorance is no excuse. Whether you know enough to make a decision or not, you still have to make the decision. And I was impressed by the amount of homework Ettinger had done. He had calculated the replenishment rate for liquid nitrogen as it bubbled off the cooling jacket around the corpsicles and had looked up the market price for LN2. The idea was science fiction. In fact, I had read it in a story by Neil R. Jones back in the early 1930s.63 But Ettinger had put numbers into it. He had gone beyond that. He had considered the religious, moral, political, and ecological consequences of what he proposed, and found the arguments for all of them. His own credentials were satisfying. He was on the physics faculty of a respectable university; and in every case where I knew enough to decide whether a statement of his was true or false, it was true.

  None of that proved that freezing would work. But it was not to be dismissed as a crackpot pipe dream. So I made arrangements to publish an extract from his book, and it appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow.

  When I finally had the printed issue in my hand, I perceived, a little belatedly, that here at last was a chance to do what I had always wanted to do: to use the electronic media to publicize science fiction.

  By then I had become fairly accustomed to microphones and cameras. In particular, I had become a regular on the all-night radio talkathons run by Long John Nebel in New York City.

  Long John was (and is) the king of nighttime radio. He is a legend in his own right, professional photographer and roadside auctioneer turned radio personality, with a slavishly devoted audience of all-night short-order cooks, nurses, night watchmen, students, and insomniacs. First to last, I’ve done the Long John show maybe four hundred times. And maybe four hundred times I’ve asked myself what I was doing there.

  One reason, I guess I have to admit, is that I seem to have a fondness for the sound of my own voice. Another reason is Long John himself, marvelous quirky man that he is. Most of all, it is because I have met a great many interesting people in Long John’s studios: scientists, writers, politicians, flying-saucer nuts (and also, I add at once, UFO experts who are not at all nutty); that human killing-machine, Roy Cohn; the late H. L. Hunt, roly-poly right-wing Santa Claus who called himself “the richest Gentile in the world”;64 Gene Leonard, the cybernetics-systems genius who single-handedly caused New York City’s worst newspaper strike by automating the composing room of The New York Times; Mel Torme, the great old “Velvet Fog” himself; admired comedians like Phil Foster and Victor Borge—well, for four hundred shows I imagine I could think of four hundred names. Some have become good friends, and one or two I will consider myself very fortunate if I never see again. Collectively it was like an immense, never-ending cocktail party. I’ve appeared on several hundred radio and TV shows in perhaps twenty countries, but the one I keep coming back to is Long John. If I’m not on it for more than a month or so, I get withdrawal symptoms.65

  What I did not do all those Long Johns for was to sell my books.

  I may have had some such notion in the beginning, but I learned better. I’m not sure that it’s possible at all to promote science fiction by radio or TV exposure. The electronic audience is too broad-based and, forgive me, too ignorant. Ignorant of what science fiction is all about. I don’t mean to put the mundanes down, but science fiction is a special taste. Most people who don’t read it anyway are not going to be moved to do so by hearing me chatter between midnight and six A.M.

  But freezing—ah, that was something else! That was the exact kind of thing that one could promote on radio and TV, and Long John had exactly the right program to do it on.

  I was in a peak period with Long John at the time, doing the show at least once a week and sometimes three or four times. When I mentioned Ettinger’s idea to John, he jumped at it. We scheduled a show right away, and the response was immense. The phones at the Galaxy Publishing Corporation office began ringing as soon as the doors were open, listeners who wanted to know where they could buy the article we had been talking about. We did a repeat show, and then another, and then got Ettinger himself on the air for one of them. By phone. John had no budget for flying guests in from Michigan, and neither did I. I took the show on the road, to other radio and TV shows in New York. A year or so later I wrote a lead Playboy article about life prolongation in general, and Playboy’s fantastically competent public-relations person of the time, Tania Grossinger, booked me onto every radio and TV show I had ever heard of, and some I hadn’t, from Johnny Carson on down. And on all of them I talked about Ettinger’s freezing program. After I had done this maybe fifty times, it began to enter my slow, tiny mind that maybe Bob Ettinger would feel a little resentment at somebody else’s taking his very own idea and running around the country with it. He came to New York around then and we had dinner.66 I waited for a suitable moment and then asked him if he, well, minded my talking so much about his brainchild. Bob smiled his slow, gentle smile and said, “Not a bit. You see, I’m very selfish. I want to be an immortal superman. In order to make that possible, it has to be possible for everybody else to be one, too, and any way that happens is all right with me.” So the Chautauqua went on
. It didn’t do an awful lot for Worlds of Tomorrow. That one first issue had a hell of a sale, but little of it carried over to any other issue. It did, I think, do something for the freezing program.

  Because of all this, a lot of people I meet seem to think that I am one of the elect. I’m not. It isn’t that I don’t believe it might work. I thought the chances reasonably good when the whole notion was only a gleam in Bob Ettinger’s eye. Now there is a lot more substance for the opinion. There are freezing organizations in half a dozen countries. They publish journals. They conduct research. They’ve even frozen eighteen or twenty real people who are now lying in their big thermos bottles with the liquid N2 percolating around them,67 waiting for that great thawing-out day. There are thousands of card-carrying immortals in the United States alone. The cards are real. They look like Medic-Alert IDs, and they say:

  NOTICE!

  If you find me dead, immediately pack me in dry ice and call the number below. On no account autopsy, embalm, fold, spindle, or mutilate me.

  Or words to that effect. To be sure, nobody has yet been defrosted. And yet I still think it’s a good enough gambling bet, viewed as a sort of Pascal’s Wager. As Ettinger says, the worst that can happen is that it won’t work, in which case you are no deader than you would have been anyway.

  The reasons I have for not signing up to be an immortal superman are philosophical and economic. Philosophical: what makes my life desirable to me is the network of relationships and the endless iterative series of projects that I am always involved in. Stop them and restart them at some future time, and they are no longer the same. Economic: freezing costs. I estimated when I first heard of it that it would take easily fifty thousand dollars cold cash to make and protect a corpsicle. Now I would put it a lot higher. So buying the chance of a future postfreeze life costs some sacrifice in this one; and it seems to me that I’m more interested in the quality of my life than in the quantity of it.