The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  I do like being an editor. But I also like ripe avocados and chocolate malted milks; but when I have had enough of either, I have had enough. I was beginning to have had enough of the joys of editing Galaxy. Besides, it was beginning to interfere with my writing.

  There is an obvious conflict between editing and writing. What I am not sure I understand is why sometimes the conflicts do not seem important and at other times they are almost insuperable. For the first five years as editor of Galaxy and If, the disease was in remission and I managed to do both with no particular strain. Bob Guinn had asked me not to write for the competition. Except for one or two stories in Analog and F&SF over that decade, I was willing to oblige him. If there was a story I felt like writing for its own sake, I wrote it. If there seemed to be an ingredient missing in the mix I was getting from other authors, I wrote something to fill the gap: I liked to see more “nonfact” articles than we had, so I wrote “The Martian Star-Gazers” and “Earth 18,” wished for science-based comedy-adventure and wrote “Under Two Moons.” Now and then I would do one for Playboy or some other noncompeting periodical, and altogether I managed to keep comfortable about writing while meeting the magazine deadlines. But then that began to be hard. I began to miss the dialectics of the author-editor confrontation, often an annoyance but always a spur. (The disadvantage of being your own editor is that you have no editor.) And there began to be simple pressure from time. Even with Judy-Lynn and Lester, nine deadlines a month were a lot. Galaxy was taking more than half my working time, some months nearly all of it. It wasn’t paying proportionately, either; there was never a time when my writing income did not exceed the salary Bob Guinn paid me. I began to mutter in my beer about quitting this lousy racket and going off to write really.

  Early in 1969 I got an invitation to attend a World Science Fiction Symposium in Rio de Janeiro. Everybody was going to be there, Poul Anderson and Forry Ackerman, A. E. van Vogt and Bob Bloch, Brian Aldiss and Alfie Bester, Jim Ballard and Arthur Clarke. It sounded like fun, and it was.

  Because I had an unbreakable speaking date in Key Biscayne, we had to come a day or two late, but Rio was an enchantment. The SF Symposium was only an added afterthought to a major world film festival, and the city was full of superstars and starlets. Fritz Lang was staying at our hotel, nearly blind, living legend who had actually made those films I had seen only as resurrected antiquarian art. Carol and I went to a party at an embassy, and sitting next to us was, for God’s sake, Nijinsky’s nephew, while just across the table was a slim young man in a peekaboo black shirt named Roman Polanski. (I had never heard of him; a month or two later all the world heard of him when his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Mansons.) The Ouro Verde restaurant fed us the best meals I have ever had anywhere in the world, with a view of the Copacabana Beach and, once, one of the most impressively beautiful thunderstorms I have ever seen out over the bay. I stole time from the symposium to fly up to Brasilia, strange futuristic city on the planalto. It is the only place I have ever been where the guides point to an intersection and tell you, not what happened there in 1066, but what is going to happen next year. (It has an impressively cantilevered building called The Museum of the History of Brasilia. It was empty.) Rio was exactly what a tropical vacation should be, swimming on the famous beach, wandering among the tourist traps, dancing in the nightclubs, and, of course, participating in that permanent floating encounter group of the science-fiction community on the move.

  And when it was over I came back to the Galaxy office and got some surprising news from Bob Guinn. He had sold the magazines to another publisher while I was away, he said. And what, exactly, were my own future plans?

  74 The sales were terrible. Bob had been right: it was a dumb idea.

  12

  How I Re-upped with the World

  If I were ever going to make the break, there would hardly be a better time. My bluff was called.

  But my pride was also involved. For several days I waited, irritable and anxious, for the phone to ring, to see if I was going to be invited to go with the magazines. When it turned out I was, it also turned out that the new publisher, Arnie Abramson, had the quaint idea that his editor should be in the office from nine to five. That settled it. I agreed to stay on as “editor emeritus,” a title without duties, devised primarily to keep me from signing up with a competing magazine, and within a few weeks the editorship had passed to Ejler Jakobssen.75

  I wasn’t particularly hurting for money, so I gave myself a month or two off, deferring the day when I would have to face my typewriter in earnest. Before the time was up, Ballantine began a reissue program which brought eighteen of my earlier books back into print in two or three large clumps. That produced an instant year’s income, or a little more than I earned in an average year, and so there was no particular incentive to start writing then. So I gave myself a little more time off. We took the family to London and Paris that summer, closed the house and spent the Christmas vacation in Bermuda. Back to Europe in the spring. To the Orient the following summer. Now and then, between trips, I would sit at my typewriter and play with some words, but nothing much came out; I know I finished two or three short stories (but they weren’t any good, and I have never even shown them to an editor). I started thinking about several novels. But whatever I put on paper seemed to twist itself in directions I didn’t like. I gave a few lectures; wrote some articles now and then when someone called up to ask for a piece and the price seemed right. But what I mostly did, as far as I can now tell, was wait for the world to clarify itself, and that it refused to do.

  Personal troubles began to crop up, some big, some small. My dear friend Evelyn del Rey was killed in a car accident; her husband, Lester, stayed in the house down the road for a time, but before long he moved into New York and I lost his companionship, too. My children were suffering various sorts of growing pains; they dealt with them as wisely and well as any other young people growing into a complicated world, and maybe somewhat better than most, but there were strains. My own general dissatisfaction did not help matters. Carol and I began having marital difficulties; there were all these clouds, none of them bigger than a man’s hand, but among them they shut out a lot of the sun.

  Part of the trouble, I am sure, is that I was turning fifty, and not liking it a bit. I had somehow got it firmly in my head that I would never live to half a century. As it got closer it seemed less and less desirable. Everything seemed less desirable.

  I don’t mean that my days were all misery. There were good times, but they never lasted very long. There weren’t really any very bad times, just gray, dull, stagnating times. About the only thing I could count on for a lift was travel. When Carol and I went to Japan in the summer of 1970, it was a ball. I’ve seldom enjoyed myself more. We grooved on Japan. We were delighted with all our hosts, Tetsu Yano and Hiro Hayakawa and Aritsune Toyota and, perhaps most of all, Hiroya Endo. It was an international conference, and there were some old friends to share Japan with us: Brian Aldiss, representing England; Judith Merril, Canada (having given up her birthright U.S. citizenship to become a Canadian landed immigrant); Arthur Clarke, representing more or less everywhere, but domiciling himself in Sri Lanka, née Ceylon. (They were having some sort of halfhearted revolution in Ceylon at the time, and Arthur spent a lot of his time trying to get news of how close the fighting was to his scuba-diving school.) The Japanese had invited the Soviets to send some writers, and they sent a delegation: Yuli Kagarlitski, most amiable and best informed of East-bloc sf literary critics; Vassili Zakharchenko, tall, imposing writer-editor, with the courtliest of manners and the most commanding expertise on a hundred different subjects; Yeremy Parnov, the one member of the team whose writing I knew at all first-hand (I had published one of his stories in translation in International Science Fiction a couple of years before); a Ukrainian sf writer; a girl translator. Carol and I had met Kagarlitski a few years earlier in London, when he was there for the H. G. Wells Centennial (one of his books w
as a Marxist criticism of Wells) and we were on some sort of junket. The others were all new to us and, at first, rather remote.

  We had all traveled a minimum of five thousand miles to get there and were accordingly fatigued. Before we had a chance to rest up and get comfortable with each other, the symposium started. For a while it looked like heavy going. The Japanese chairman gave a welcoming speech—in Japanese; then followed by consecutive translations into English and Russian. Arthur gave a rather formal talk on science fiction and the space program (followed by translations into Russian and Japanese). Vassili Zakharchenko gave an even more formal address on the necessity for international cooperation and the special qualities Soviet science fiction could add to world literature—in Russian; then into Japanese and English. All this took forever, or somewhat longer than that. We had signed up for two weeks of this! Carol and Brian and I looked at each other with dread. There had always been the chance that it would be a crashing bore, of course. It was the first time in history that the Soviets and the West had participated in a formal sf conference. Detente was still a couple of years away; international relations were touchy. We could not blame the Japanese for keeping it formal. It is hard enough to put on any kind of science-fiction conference. They not only had the problem of arranging logistics and providing a program, they ran the risk of starting World War III.

  But they were more perceptive and more daring than we knew. As soon as the formalities were over Tetsu Yano took the stage. We Japanese, he told us (in English), have a tradition. You may think it silly or childish, but we would be grateful if you would humor our customs. We want each one of you to come up one at a time, and we will ask you to do something. And they had each of us, one by one, do a sort of vaudeville turn. Kagarlitski sang a little song. Judy was asked to give a two-minute speech on how it felt to be a grandmother. Arthur gave his version of a South Sea Islands hula. We all did something, all pretty silly; then we played a sort of group game (each of us required to say all the Japanese words we knew, as quickly as we could think of them); and then it was no longer possible for us to be stiff and formal with each other. For three weeks we lived in each other’s pockets, and loved it, and each other.

  We left Japan in a golden glow, on a JAL 747 to Hawaii. (It is an interesting experience to come into Honolulu on a Japanese plane, low over Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor.) Hawaii is perhaps the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. We stayed at one of the tourist traps on Waikiki the first night, a typical hardsell Hilton where you have to pass a dozen boutiques to get to the registration desk and where every petal in the lei has a price tag. We were both tired, and resentful of the Miami Beach tinsel, so the next day we flew to the big island and stayed at what I have always thought the most beautiful hotel in the world, the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel. I had been there before, lecturing for the American Management Association, and for four or five years had been looking for a chance to stay there again. Palms grow through the open central courts. Every night two or three mantas fly through the underwater lights at the end of its dock. If you rent a car and drive along the roads, you pass unexpected valleys and waterfalls. Its beach is unfailingly sunny, and the water always gentle. But even Mauna Kea was a letdown after Japan, and we cut our visit short for home.

  I had business to transact in Los Angeles, so Carol went on ahead and I checked in at the Century Plaza. Unfortunately, the people I most needed to see were out of town, and Los Angeles itself was in an early fall heat-and-smog cycle. They laid on a small earthquake for me, which was interesting enough because it was the only one I have ever experienced (not counting the odd volcanic shudder on Mount Vesuvius), but the visit was a washout and I caught a redeye flight home, feeling tired, gritty, and depressed.

  Hawaii was a letdown from Japan, California from Hawaii, New Jersey from California; things slid downhill, all together, like a glacier creeping down a mountainside. Every day seemed a little grayer and grimier than the day before. A few weeks after I got home I was invited to take part in a New York Academy of Sciences planetology meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria. Even that went badly. October, November, December…do you know, I cannot think of anything good that happened anywhere at all in those last few months of 1970. Wherever I looked, things were grimier and more unrewarding than I could remember. I picked up a cold somewhere or other, and it turned into a persistent, hacking cough. I began to put on weight. Not just a little plumpness; I was fat, nearly forty pounds more than the 175 I had weighed all my adult life. Carol and I were growing more remote every day. I fiddled with a little writing, but it was hard and scant and slow, and none of it came out to suit me. I began to have money troubles. I could hardly believe that the money was running out; but some money that was due was slow coming in, some that I had expected turned out not to be going to happen, work that I had contracted to do wasn’t getting done, and so I wasn’t taking in very much. I let my bank balance get low. I sold the little stock I owned—I know full well that I am too ignorant of the market to invest sensibly in securities, so I don’t invest at all; but I had accumulated a little as payment for services rendered. And Christmas came along, and there were four kids expecting goodies; and there was a point right then at Christmas when I was so broke I was going around the house emptying the jars and drawers of pennies tossed in them, to roll and take to the bank and convert to bills. The last week or two of 1970 and the first of 1971 were about the lowest point in my life. Nothing went well. Everything went badly. I felt exhausted most of the time, and the cough became a griping hack, and I began to think that there was a good chance that all the half million or more cigarettes I have smoked in my life were finally performing as advertised and I might very well be not far from dying. The worst part was that I didn’t really mind. I found so few satisfactions in my life just then that departing from it was no sweat. I knew, in the forebrain part of my mind, that life might seem worth living again: that there might very well be fun to be had, relationships to explore, stories to write in which I might even feel pride, rewards to be obtained. But it seemed to me that it was highly unlikely that any of it would be new. I had tasted all those things already, and even though I recognized that I might enjoy tasting them again, it seemed little more than a summer rerun of a life I had already lived and didn’t especially want to repeat.

  Perhaps it is what is called the “male menopause.” I don’t know. I was fifty-one, which is the right time for it, I suppose.

  Then a fellow knocked on my door and wanted to sell me life insurance.

  I thought it was pretty funny. I really didn’t think I was a good prospect; was a little sorry for him for wasting his time. But he was as persistent as an insurance salesman is supposed to be, and more or less as a joke I agreed to take the physical. I passed. I was astonished: no lung cancer, no emphysema, no hypertension, no nothing? I was, to be sure, a little overweight, the doctor said, and recommended I lose some.

  So I went home, and paid my premium, and poured myself a cup of coffee and thought things over. It occurred to me that I might go to my own doctor and see what he had to say. I was pretty sure I knew what he was going to tell me. Assuming he didn’t find something terminal, he would say I should lose weight, get more exercise, drink less coffee, smoke fewer cigarettes, and sleep more regularly. All right, I thought, let’s try a little of that. So I did. And after a little while I began to feel somewhat more alive. I sat down at the typewriter and tried stringing some words together: they strung pretty well, I thought.76 I took the family to the Soviet Union, partly on business, partly because I’d promised my son I’d take him to any country of which he learned to speak the language (expecting French or Spanish; but he picked Russian), and that was almost as high a spot as Japan.

  And after a while it came to me that I had reenlisted for another hitch with life.

  Reality is a terrible annoyance to a novelist. It does not come in tidy packages. What I want to do is to shape the events of my life to fit a dramatic pattern. They won’t shape. Piece
s don’t fit in, others protrude and spoil the symmetry. I don’t even know how to end this story. The time to stop, says Mark Twain, is with a wedding or a funeral. I am not presently in the market for either, but I think it’s time to stop.

  By now it is clear to the slowest observer, even to me, that I have committed my life to science fiction. It is fair to ask why. I mean, I’m smart enough. I could have had several quite different careers, and some of them, at least at the time, looked a lot more attractive in terms of dollars and pride. When you come right down to it, is making up lies about things that have never happened really a respectable way for a grown man to spend his days?

  I have been asked that question. And yes, dear friends, there have been times—a whole lot of times, though not so many of them recently—when I have asked it of myself. The question is rational enough, but it has only a nonrational answer: love. I do it because I’m in love. A long time ago, maybe when I was twelve, maybe even younger, I fell in love with writing science fiction. Through many turpitudes and dalliances, I have stayed in love ever since.

  Let me tell you how falling in love happens, because of all the points of decision human beings ordinarily encounter, the act of falling in love is the least rational and the least understood. It goes like this:

  John and Joan meet—it doesn’t much matter where, or how. They notice each other. What John notices about Joan is that she smells good, has an inviting figure, laughs nicely when he wants her to laugh, and looks upon him with a rewarding show of interest. What Joan notices about John is much the same. On these flimsy data they each construct a private image of the other. They make each other up! What they know is very little. They fill in the rest of the picture by inventing qualities to match some private daydream. John has always wanted a girl to listen to violin concerti with him, who liked to make love in the morning, willing to walk five miles at a clip just to see what a stroller might see. He doesn’t know these things are true of Joan. But he doesn’t know that they aren’t, either, and maybe? who knows? So he lays on her the traits he would like to find; going to bed with her will be like so, lounging on a beach will be thus; and the rest of the date, maybe the rest of the year or the rest of the life, is spent mapping reality against the hypothesis. The fit is never perfect. But as long as it is not too discordantly wrong, the love lasts.