The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

I cannot tell you how much anger and resentment I felt toward the entire medical profession at that time. The individual doctor, whether in his professional capacity or otherwise, is usually a decent person, and sometimes a lot better than that. Collectively, in the concentration-camp milieu of a hospital or clinic, they are nearly to be despised. I am sure that not all the doctors, ward boys, technicians and nurses are evil people, and I even think that some of them are close to saints. But what I am also sure of is that the good ones tolerate and even protect the bad.72

  At the end of nearly two years of trotting Kathy from place to place, at great cost to her and to all of us in every way, what we had to show for it was a name. They said she suffered from “petit mal.”

  Petit mal is not related to grand mal. Grand mal is epilepsy. It had been established that Kathy was not epileptic. But, like an epileptic, she had seizures. They were relatively mild and brief, but they were seizures all the same. She would black out. In that moment she had no control over her limbs; they would collapse under her, and she would fall. When the seizure was over a moment later, she would pick herself up, perhaps not knowing what had happened, and try to remember what she had been about to do. It is not called “petit mal” because the term describes the etiology or helps to determine therapy, but only because it happens and therefore needs a name.

  At the point of despair, we were at last referred to the New Jersey Neuropsychological Institute. For the first time we found a team who not only knew what they were doing, but knew enough to consider Kathy a person rather than a lump of meat. They gave her the same battery of tests—humanely administered, and with the cooperation Kathy had always been willing to give if allowed half a chance. Then they called us all together for a conference, Kathy and Carol and I and six or eight specialists, and told us what had gone wrong in her nervous system.

  “Neurological impairment” does not really mean much more than “petit mal.” But they were able to pinpoint the specific area in the brain where it had occurred. How had it occurred? It was far too late to tell that. Probably there had never been a time when anyone could say for sure. Kathy’s had been a difficult birth, and that was a likely candidate, but it could have been some prenatal chemical antagonism, a genetic miscoding, a fall, a fever—it could have been anything. But at least there was that much understanding, and there was something more. The seizures, they said, would probably stop of themselves when she reached her teens. That was still years off. But meanwhile, they prescribed a different drug. We took the prescription and had it filled, and when Kathy popped the first pill in her mouth the seizures stopped. She has never had another.

  Kathy has still not achieved her full potential. The strangeness of brain injury is that in some areas the brain simply does not work, and so some kinds of functions do not occur. Over years the brain is sometimes able to reroute its information-handling into other areas. Some of that has occurred with Kathy. She walks, she talks, she learns, she enjoys life. She is able to travel thousands of miles, from one country to another, by herself. She is a healthy, tall, good-looking young lady with a keen sense of humor and a disconcerting ability to understand nuances of behavior. Much is difficult for her, but we have not yet found anything that is impossible. And what is left of her problems is no longer as much due to brain injury as to the fact that so much of her early life was spent coddled and protected, so that she was not able to experiment on her own.

  Because of Kathy, Carol and I have found ourselves involved in programs to help handicapped children. Because of that, we have discovered how many of them there are. There isn’t a block in America that doesn’t hide some children who are spastic, or emotionally disturbed, or perceptually impaired, or somehow, somewhere, cheated of what most of us take for granted. Ten percent of all children are significantly handicapped.

  It is important to know that all of them can be helped. For a few, tragically, not much more can be done than to relieve a little of the pain and despair. For some, they can be brought to complete and normal lives.

  But there is always something.

  It isn’t always easy to find. I was going to say something about that, and then I remembered it had been said already:

  Another blind alley, he had thought in despair. Another, after a hundred too many already. First, “Wait for him to outgrow it.” He doesn’t. Then, “We must reconcile ourselves to God’s will.” But you don’t want to. Then give him the prescription three times a day for three months. And it doesn’t work. Then chase around for six months with the Child Guidance Clinic to find out it’s only letterheads and one circuit-riding doctor who doesn’t have time for anything. Then, after four dreary, weepy weeks of soul-searching, the State Training School, and find out it has an eight-year waiting list. Then the private custodial school, and find they’re fifty-five hundred dollars a year—without medical treatment!—and where do you get fifty-five hundred dollars a year? And all the time everybody warns you, as if you didn’t know it: “Hurry! Do something! Catch it early! This is the critical stage! Delay is fatal!”73

  That’s from “The Meeting,” one of the posthumous collaborations between Cyril Kornbluth and myself. When Cyril died, he left a good deal of incomplete work, some almost-done stories, some just fragments. One was actually a completed manuscript (or would have been, except that somehow a page or two had been irrevocably lost) about a meeting of a parents’ association of a school for handicapped children. It wasn’t quite a story. It was a scene, but a powerful and beautifully written one, and it had come out of Cyril’s own experience of just such a school. Over the years I tinkered most of Cyril’s fragments into stories and had them published. “The Meeting” I left alone. At first it was too foreign to my experience for me to know how to handle it. Then it was too close. Of course, “The Meeting” is fiction. The child in it, and the school, are fictitious; but all the schools share the same hope and pain. And, a decade and a half after Cyril died, I perceived how I could make the scene into a story, and did, and Ed Ferman published it in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1972.

  Sometimes, when one reads a story, there is a sense of identification and revelation: what is happening in the story is what has happened to oneself, and some painful lump in the subconscious shifts to a more easeful position. Catharsis? Therapy? It is the same for the writer as for the reader. Cyril and I had dealt with frustrations in fiction before—our not-very-successful hurricane novel, A Town Is Drowning, was an act of revenge on a storm that had ripped off my roof and flooded his home a year earlier. “The Meeting” was harder to deal with, but I am sure that it too was a kind of therapy for both of us.

  The year after it was published I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto with some hopes of coming back with more than I had had when I left. I had published a story called “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” the year before. In my vanity, I really expected to win something for it. Nebula time had come and gone, and somebody else had taken away the prize, but it was up for a Hugo and I was hopeful.

  So were Ben Bova and Isaac Asimov, and the three of us were sitting at the same table. Now, we are all old pros, you understand. But as the long-winded speakers wound down and handing-out time came close, conversation flagged at our table. Even Ben ran out of jokes. Isaac had to get up to go to the bathroom six, count them, six times between the serving of the coffee and the presentation of the awards.

  Then the awards began. Apart from the Hugos, there are a lot of them, and each speaker seemed impelled to carry on at insane length both in giving and in receiving them. But they came to Best Editor; and it was Ben, for Analog, and he got up to collect it and brought it back and plumped it down in the middle of our table.

  Then they came to Best Novel. It was Isaac, for The Gods Themselves. And he too went up to pick up the trophy, and brought it back, and then there were two.

  And then they came to Best Novella and it wasn’t mine. It went to Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for the World Is Forest.
>
  I intensely admire Ursula Le Guin as a writer, and even like that story. But I could have wished very much at that moment that she had never decided to write it. Isaac and Ben were very nice about it, but I could see that I was bringing the class of the neighborhood down.

  Then along came the award for Best Short Story. I had actually forgotten that “The Meeting” was even nominated.

  But it had been, and it won in a tie with an R. A. Lafferty story, and honor was saved.

  By the time I got back to the table with Cyril’s Hugo and mine, my sunny nature had reasserted itself. I had had time to reflect that Cyril had had the bad luck to die before awards were common, and so this one was specially valued. I accepted the handshakes and kisses. But I was not prepared for the reactions of Ben and Isaac, who were both staring at the now four Hugos in the middle of the table. “Showy bastard,” Ben hissed, and Isaac chimed in, “Yeah! We only got one Hugo. How come you get two?”

  60 There is, of course, no such thing as an objective opinion. But if you take the Hugo awards as being as close to such a measure as we’ve got, then look at Volume Two of Isaac Asimov’s The Hugo Winners and count up the numbers which first appeared in my magazines as compared with those which first appeared in all other science-fiction magazines combined. (You can find the provenance in the copyright-acknowledgments page.) The score is Galaxy et al. 9, all others 2.

  61 “Paul” because his real name, of course, was Paul M. A. Linebarger. Until his death he was a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a frequent consultant on sensitive Far East matters for the State Department—one reason for his keeping his real identity secret.

  62 I did, finally, get both magazines on a monthly schedule, but not for a few more years. It made little difference one way or another to the sales.

  63 “The Jameson Satellite.” It turned out little Bobby Ettinger had read the same story at around the same time.

  64 I thought his political notions were pathetic when they weren’t despicable, but I must say that I thought H. L. Hunt himself was rather sweet. We had coffee together. Guess who picked up the check. I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t the richest Gentile in the world.

  65 As this book was in proof Long John died of cancer. For millions of listeners, the night air will be bleaker.

  66 His uncle joined us for dinner. This is not the sort of thing that I usually think worth mentioning, but Bob Ettinger’s uncle is Peewee Russell, who just happens to be maybe the greatest jazz clarinetist who ever lived.

  67 If you are astute enough to have noticed that I said “helium” earlier, you can also probably figure out that the reason for the change to nitrogen was financial.

  68 There is a more complete description of a slightly different form of the machine in Martin Gardner’s column in Scientific American. Martin was not as impressed by it as I was.

  69 Ben Bova says it was J. B. S. Haldane.

  70 All that anyone would possibly want to know about this is in my book Practical Politics. If you can find a copy. Which I doubt.

  71 I’ll give you an unassailable example. By the time you read this, Bantam will have published a remarkably impressive first novel called The Short-Timers, by Gustav Hasford. The chain of causality is complicated, but it comes down to this: Bantam would not have published that book if Hasford had not met the editor at Milford; and I know this is so because the editor is me. (The reason in this case is not that I would not have read it sympathetically if it had been from someone I never heard of—the novel made its own appeal—but that the author would not have considered submitting it to me if we hadn’t met. It isn’t science fiction, or anything like it.)

  72 There are two reasons for the explosive growth of malpractice suits in America, and only one of them is the cupidity of the lawyers involved. The other is the existence of a lot of malpractice, by medical personnel who are either incompetent or uncaring, and who are rarely restrained by their colleagues.

  73 From “The Meeting,” by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Copyright © 1972 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  11

  Have Mouth, Will Travel

  In 1965 I encountered a new friend and a new way of filling up my time. I had a phone call from T. George Harris, then an editor for Look and later head honcho for Psychology Today. George said that he had met a fellow named John Diebold and thought the two of us ought to know each other. So he had arranged a luncheon.

  George’s instincts were exactly right, at least as far as my own reactions were concerned. John Diebold is a Renaissance man, a management Titan, a cosmopolitan gourmet; I had not met quite his like before. His management-consultancy firm has offices in nearly every city of the world worth living in. Among other ventures, he conducts a Research Institute which tells management people the things they will not learn from the B-School or the Kiplinger Report. At the luncheon—it was at Lutece, of course—Diebold asked if I had thought much about the future of corporate management. I told him what had occurred to me. He invited me to repeat it at the next Diebold Research Institute meeting, and I did, with flourishes and variations. Business Week covered the event, with a picture and a quote, and my phone began to ring.

  So for the next five or six years I found myself talking to groups who didn’t know anything about science fiction but were willing to listen to what I had to say, all over the map. Corporation presidents in Hawaii, architects in New Haven, Kiwanis in Alabama, international religious conferences in New York, life-insurance executives in Chicago, industrial chemists in Michigan, space scientists in Georgia, mathematicians in Washington, women’s clubs, temples, rod-and-gun clubs, churches, interior decorators, soap and detergent manufacturers, science teachers, English teachers, for God’s sake kindergarten teachers—it snowballs. The way it works, if you talk to a group of eighteen hundred management types, there are always ten or twenty among them who are themselves trying to book talent for the next meeting of their own group. So they are scouting for talent, and if when they catch your act you do not appear visibly drunk or demented, invitations follow.

  Publicity helps a whole lot, and there I was very lucky. Sylvia Porter quoted me in her column, The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a lengthy article, I was on a lot of radio and TV shows. It was all interesting. It got me to places I might not otherwise have seen (management people really do themselves well when they meet). But it was getting out of hand. I was occupying some very fancy hotel rooms, but the world outside the meeting places I was seeing only from the windows of a car going to and from an airport. On the day when I realized I had scheduled myself to speak at a luncheon meeting in Tuscaloosa at one and at a Columbia University gathering in New York City seven hours later, I decided I needed professional help.

  The persons available for such help are called lecture agents. There are scores of them. I didn’t fool around. I went right to the top. Armed with an introduction from a writer who was both a good friend of mine and a highly valued client of his, I spread my problems on the agent’s desk. He pondered for a while and then allowed that he could help. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to, really. Did I have any publicity material?

  With some effort I assembled a batch of clippings and notices. (I don’t like to keep those things—not because I lack vanity, but because I feel I have too much of it already; keeping a press book panders to urges I had rather suppress.) He thumbed through them, and we talked, rather inconclusively, over a period of a month or two. Then he called me in to say he had solved my problem. His son was just out of Yale and coming into the family business. He had decided to let me be his son’s very first lecture client. Gosh, I said, falling to my knees and kissing his ring, when can we start? Right now, he said. And there was a peal of trumpets and his son the Yale man came in and whisked me away.

  “Pohl,” he said, “I’ve made a study of your case, and I know what you want. You want to get into the universities.”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding feverishly. “I’ve always liked tal
king to college audiences.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “I’m talking here. You’ve got the wrong act.”

  “But,” I said, “I’ve never had—”

  “Old stuff,” he said; “you need to keep up with the times. You don’t know what’s going on now. The occult! That’s what they want to hear about on the campuses. I know this, because I’ve just graduated from Yale. That’s all they talk about there, Buckley and the occult.”

  “I’ll have to think about that,” I said, and went away.

  I never went back. After a while I got a sort of reproachful note from the father, returning my publicity clips, and that was the end of that.

  Since then I’ve tried a few other lecture agents, but they really are not any solution to any problem of mine, whatever they may do for Alvin Toffler and Arthur Clarke. I do a lot of talking, mostly to college groups (the Yale man was right about what I preferred), but seldom through an agent. I’ll go on talking to colleges as long as they go on letting me, too, because, next to writing, it is my favorite vice. College students are about the best people in the world, and rapping with them from time to time is a bigger high than dope.

  In the last few years I edited Galaxy, things were coming along. Both Galaxy and If were finally monthly. The paperback book sidelines, Galaxy Novels and MagaBooks, had faded away, but we began to add other magazines: first Worlds of Tomorrow, then a wild idea that I had dreamed up over a quitting-time drink with Bob Guinn, International Science Fiction. The idea was to publish science fiction from foreign authors, little of which had appeared in the United States at that time. It seemed to me that some of it was quite different from what we were reading from the Anglo-American school, and maybe worth showing to an American audience. Bob thought it was a dumb idea. Still, he mentioned it to our distributors next time he saw them, and they thought it exciting. So we brought it out, with stories by Soviet, Australian, French, German, Italian, and other writers, the first time most of them had been seen in the U.S.74