The Way the Future Was: A Memoir

by Frederik Pohl

  For most of this time the person who did all the manuscript reading, copy-editing, proofreading, blurb writing, and general donkeywork was me, sometimes with a secretary, sometimes without. It now began to be more than I could handle, and I started looking for an assistant. The Hunter College placement office sent down a resume that looked interesting: Judy-Lynn Benjamin—a recent graduate, early twenties, specialist in James Joyce, some writing background; she sounded great. I arranged for an interview, and I hired her.

  A little later we added another title, Worlds of Fantasy. I have written a little fantasy and read a lot of it; some of it I enjoy immensely, but it is not an area in which I feel very confident of my judgment once I get below the obvious masterpieces. So we took Lester del Rey aboard to edit that and for various kinds of expertise.

  I thought they made a good team, Judy-Lynn and Lester, and congratulated myself on my wisdom in hiring them.

  A dozen years later, I am not so sure. They thought they were a good team, too. Now married, they are collectively Del Rey books, an imprint of Ballantine Books. Lester is still handling the fantasy, and Judy-Lynn the science fiction. And they are the competitors I fear. In this week’s Times Book Review the top best seller on the mass-market paperback list is Judy-Lynn’s Star Wars, and still high up on the trade-paperback best-seller list is Lester’s The Sword of Shannara. And one of these days I am going to have to explain to my employers at Bantam just how I happened to let these two books get away from me.

  However antlike and industrious an editor is, the aphids that squeeze out the honey are the writers. Editing is such a big ego trip that it’s hard to remember that. Sometimes I forgot. The telephone isn’t congenial to me, and letters don’t always say what needs to be said. I tried to spend as much time as I could with writers, one on one, face to face, and burned up a lot of jet fuel doing it.

  One of the advantages to me of the lecture circuit was that it got me around the country a lot, and I used the opportunities to visit writers, Florida was Doc Smith territory; he and his wife, Jeannie, lived in a big, permanent house trailer in a park in Clearwater, and kept a smaller mobile one for dragging across the country when the wanderlust hit them. Every time I found myself nearby I stopped in to chat him up and enjoy his company and spur him on. The Bay Area was Poul Anderson and Jack Vance, and down the coast a way Bob Heinlein in his curious, new circular house with the pie-shaped rooms—a marvelous idiosyncratic home that I still envy a lot. Poul was one of the mainstays of my magazines, as he has been for everybody’s for the past quarter of a century, always good, always meeting his deadlines; apart from which, he and Karen threw fine parties. Jack Vance and his wife lived just a mountain or two away, in the hilly parts north of the San Francisco Bay, in a house built on the side of a precipice. Jack wrote The Dragon Masters for me, a beautiful strange novella of odd creatures and their convoluted social lives, endless light-years and centuries from here and now. The Dragon Masters seemed to me the kind of story whose complexity and strangeness deter some readers. I didn’t want my readers deterred if I could help it, especially since the story itself was a masterpiece of its kind. After some pondering, I persuaded Jack Gaughan to draw small figures of all the various kinds of creatures in the story and even to do a map to help follow the action on. When convention time came, The Dragon Masters won the first Hugo for any story I published, and Jack’s illustrations were nominated for the art award, too—as far as I know, the only time ever that specific illustrations were nominated. In Washington I visited Paul Linebarger, better known as Cordwainer Smith, in his sunny home near Rock Creek Park, with the big gold-and-scarlet birth scroll from Sun Yat-sen in his living room.

  Bob Heinlein and Poul Anderson, Jack Vance and the two Smiths, Doc and Cordwainer—all gave me first-rate work to publish. So did half a dozen others—so did a lot more than half a dozen others, one time or another but the mainstays were those five, plus Keith Laumer, Fred Saberhagen, Bob Silverberg, Mack Reynolds, Larry Niven, and Harlan Ellison. What Laumer and Saberhagen gave were series stories, really nice ones. They are the kind of thing that a lucky editor finds under his Christmas tree, almost as good as a serial at keeping the readers coming back, not as annoying to the readers who hate having their stories interrupted a month at a time. Of course, Santa Claus isn’t real, so they don’t actually turn up under a tree. You have to coax them along. When I saw Keith’s first story about an interstellar diplomat named James Retief, I bought it at once and wanted more, and consequently devoted a lot of thought to persuading Keith to make it a series. I couldn’t do it in person; he was in the Air Force, in some strange overseas place like England, and none of my lecture dates seemed to be taking me in that direction. What I didn’t know was that Keith perceived those potentials just as clearly as I did, and in fact the one I bought was actually the second of the series. He cooperated cheerfully, and for several years Retief was a big part of the glue that kept the If readership sticking with us.

  Fred Saberhagen turned up as a brand-new writer with a short chess puzzle story. I wasn’t too crazy about the chess, but as a little fillip to the background he had thrown in a maniacally murderous, preprogrammed automatic space battleship which he called a “berserker.” The chess game was only limited fun. The Berserkers were a great deal of fun; and when I suggested to him what he could make of them he saw the point at once, and we published a great deal about them, to the delight of both readers and me.

  Toward the end of my tenure with Galaxy, after Lester del Rey had come aboard, he and I decided to run our own “best of the year” award. The Nebulas and the Hugos already existed, but the Nebulas were being given on the basis of tiny votes—as few as half a dozen appear to have won at least one of the early Nebulas. The Hugos were perhaps more representative, but the difficulty with the Hugos is the difficulty with the World Science Fiction Convention committees that give them. Each is a brand-new group every year. There are continuing rules to govern the handling of the awards, but each committee has its own personal style, and some are a lot more diligent than others. We decided to conduct a mail survey of subscribers, and give away a few thousand dollars in prizes to the writers the readers said they liked best.

  Most of the stars did well, as we had expected them to do. But the writer who did most surprisingly well, with every story rated high by the readers—and we had published a lot of his stories that year—was Mack Reynolds. I think Mack may be the most underrated writer in science fiction today. As far as I know, he has never received any of the ongoing awards, perhaps has never been as much as nominated for one. What was he doing beating out so many of the Big Names?

  And then it penetrated my tiny, torpid brain that Mack had in fact contributed quite a lot to science fiction. I remembered telling Robert Theobald about some of the interesting political-economic ideas in science fiction, and realizing that they had all come from Mack: the credit-card economy, the Minimum Basic income, “Common Europe,” some fancy variations on today’s political systems—all Mack’s. I was at first surprised that he had done so well, and then surprised at myself for being surprised.

  Mack is a heavyset, hard-drinking, no-frills guy, and he writes the kind of prose you would expect. No one would call him a stylist. The “New Wave” hypertrophy of literary values left Mack untouched. But if you consider language as a tool for the communication of concepts, then Mack uses it better than most of us.

  The writer who came in almost as well as Mack overall (and carried off one of the prizes, too) was his exact opposite, Robert Silverberg.

  Soon after I became editor of Galaxy and If, Bob made me a proposition. He had been out of science fiction for a number of years, concentrating on writing the shelves of quickie books that made him rich before he was thirty. He wanted back in. But, for personal reasons, he wanted a deal. He wanted to know that I would buy every story he sent in. If I really hated one, I could call off the deal at any time; but I still had to buy that one. It is not the kind of arrangement I would
make with every writer, but, thinking it over, it seemed safe enough with AgBob. He was a hard-nosed professional. If he had a professional’s weakness (at that time, for example, a mournable tendency to milk wordage, so that a lot of his stories turned out fifty percent over their best fighting weight), he also had a professional’s virtues. It was exceedingly unlikely that he would turn in a manuscript that would disgrace him or us. And he was capable, I knew he was capable, of really great work when he chose to do it.

  So I agreed, and for most of the decade of the 60s Galaxy and If had a lock on every word of science fiction Bob wrote. We published it all, and I never regretted the deal. There is no question that Bob is one of the larger talents ever to hit science fiction. I don’t think he has always realized that talent. His early work is padded, and most of his major writing of the 70s is so searingly, soul-depressingly down that I find it hard to read; Tolstoy and Céline are Mary Poppins compared with Bob Silverberg when he gets a good grump on. But when he is at the top of his elegant, world-weary form—“Nightwings,” say, or parts of “Shadrach in the Furnace”—he is hard to beat.

  For a while it seemed that the Silverbergs’ lives and ours were inextricably meshed. Carol and I had a death in the family, then a fire that seriously damaged our house and almost leveled it entirely; shortly thereafter, so did they. He wrote me a letter to complain, with that special kind of irony that contains serious pain, that he didn’t like being condemned to recapitulate all the tragedies of my life, and would I please tell him what I was contemplating next so he would know what to expect?

  Larry Niven did well in the voting, too—and has gone on to do even better in the decade and more since then. I have always had a special attachment to Larry’s work. He was one of the first of the “If Firsts,” the stories by previously unpublished authors I had running in every issue of If for years on end. Larry had an advantage denied to most would-be writers. He had chosen for one of his grandfathers one of the oil kings of southern California, the very Doheny whom Doheny Drive is named after, and he could be philosophical about the relatively low cash rewards of his apprenticeship. It didn’t keep him from working. He was one of the most prolific of our writers. Because I had published his first story (as well as his second, third, fourth, and nth), he gave us first look at everything.

  Larry is the best of the recent hard-sf writers, and I felt a little guilty about keeping him from being published, at least once in a while, in that quintessential hard-sf periodical, Analog. It wasn’t just conscience. It seemed to me that Larry could reach a somewhat different audience now and then, with happy results for himself and, indirectly, for us, too. So I encouraged him to offer one or two stories to John. Queerly, John would have none of them, though at least one of them, “Slowboat Cargo,” was one of Larry’s best, and placed high in the readers’ voting.

  To everyone’s astonishment, most of all his own, Harlan Ellison did not do particularly well in that year’s voting. It wasn’t entirely fair. The period of the voting happened to be one in which Harlan had published only one or two stories, and those not of his best.

  I must confess, as evidence of the existence of grievous character flaws, that I was not as unhappy as I should have been to see Harlan taken down a peg. It isn’t that I don’t like him. Harlan is an exciting, talented, fun person to be around, a brilliant writer and capable of great exertions as a friend. He is also one of the twentieth century’s greatest sources of tsoris. For most of that decade I published nearly all the sf Harlan wrote, and I would estimate that, taking everything together, Harlan was as much pain and trouble as all the next ten troublesome writers combined. If I tried to change a title, the calls started: “What do you mean, just ‘Repent, Harlequin’? Has to be ‘Said the Ticktock Man,’ too, otherwise you wreck the whole rhythm of it.” When he judged I was editing an issue’s copy, he’d be on the phone: “Just wondering, Fred; any, uh, changes you were thinking of making? What? Fred, I don’t understand you; why can’t I have one character call another one a douche bag?” Usually he won those arguments, and maybe he should have; the case for is that an author should have control over what he is represented as saying, the case against is that a magazine should have some sort of consistent personality of its own, and any time you want to debate, I’ll take either side. But he was not always reasonable. Somehow he got his hands on a copy of Scientific American containing some pretty, spectrum-like bands of color. He wanted to use them for decorations in one of his stories. I had to say no. For one thing, we didn’t own them. For another, it wasn’t physically possible. Neither argument satisfied Harlan: “Why can’t you use the lines?” “I keep telling you, Harlan, we don’t have four-color printing inside the book.” “Right, you haven’t had so far, but what I’m suggesting is—”

  Harlan offended is not a temperate person. Neither is Lester del Rey, and one of the ghastlier memories of my life is a dinner in a restaurant at the Statler-Hilton in New York. It was worldcon time, and everyone knows that all hotel restaurants grow faint and collapse when a science-fiction convention is near. But I must say the Statler-Hilton set new records for awfulness. It was the night of the costume ball, and we all wanted to be there for it, so we allowed three hours to eat. Not enough. You would not believe me if I told you all that happened; the core of it is that everything was unbelievably late, and when it arrived part of it was the wrong thing and the rest was pretty awful. (Carol had ordered escargots, but they had been allowed to sit for most of an hour before the waiter could bring himself to deliver them. Have you ever eaten room-temperature snails?) Harlan had ordered popovers, and didn’t like them; Lester had gone to some length to describe the chef’s salad he wanted, and got instead some wilted lettuce and a pale tomato. It was so bad that I, even I, was moved to complain, and so I rose to explain to the maitre d’ that not only was his staff hopeless but he himself should return to the tire-refinishing industry he had obviously just left. But he wasn’t listening to me. With an expression of horror on his face he was staring past my shoulder, and I turned to see Lester skating the plate of salad across the floor while Harlan, on the other side of the room, was bouncing his popover against the wall to prove his point about its texture.

  It does not pay to fool with Harlan, and although I found our little editor/writer encounters stimulating, I began to wonder how long I could stand the loss of blood. What I didn’t know was that Harlan was planning a role reversal. I began to hear about an anthology he was planning to edit, something called Dangerous Visions. The publisher involved said that, as near as he could figure out, what it mostly was, was stories that had been rejected by everybody in the business. Told that that didn’t seem like the best idea anybody had ever had, he added, “Well, according to Harlan, it’s because they’re so good and so different that everyone is afraid to print them. Except me,” he added, turning pale.

  It is an article of faith with some writers that such stories exist, kept from an eager audience by the poltroon editors. It is an article of faith with me that this is hogwash. Some editors do hesitate to publish off-track stories, but if the story is any good, some other editor, sooner or later, will snap it up. Then Harlan called me up:

  “Fred, I want a story from you for Dangerous Visions, the kind of story that no editor dares to print.”

  “Harlan, I don’t know what kind of story that is.”

  “Shit, man! Of course you do. Like you’ve been printing all along in Galaxy!”

  Actually, I think Dangerous Visions was a pretty good collection, and I’m pleased to be in it. My story is called “The Day the Martians Came.” Or should be. What it says in the book is “The Day After the Day the Martians Came,” because when Harlan realized what opportunity lay before him, he couldn’t help himself; he changed the title.

  The 1961 World Convention was held on the West Coast. For Carol and me, it was our first real look at the area. We loved it, especially San Francisco and Washington State, and whenever the chances came from then on, we commu
ted back and forth. In 1965 the convention was in London. Not counting World War II for me, it was our first look at Europe, and we loved that, too. As one who firmly believes that all our energy reserves are being bled white and disaster is only a few years away, it sometimes troubles my conscience that I have become such a jet-fuel addict, but I do love traveling.

  One of the great good things about my world is that a lot of traveling goes with the job. There are lectures to give and conferences to attend and meetings to be met. It isn’t all joyriding. A lot of hours of work go into, for instance, the sort of tour I have done once or twice for the State Department, culturally exchanging views on science fiction from Skopje to Leningrad. Three weeks into the last one, I counted up and realized I had totaled less than seventy hours of sleep in the preceding twenty-one days.

  But usually it’s a little more relaxed, and in and among the talks to Bulgarian professors of English and the panels on the New Wave in Chester and Toronto I get a chance to see things I would not otherwise have seen, and meet people I could not otherwise have known. The circumstances are not always ideal. I have observed that my wanderings follow the seasons, but the wrong way around for my maximum pleasure; it is customary for me to need to go to Minnesota in January, and Miami Beach on Labor Day. No matter. The company is usually good. We’ve seen Stonehenge with Jack and Blanche Williamson, and spent a weekend on a Japanese lake with Brian Aldiss and Arthur Clarke and Judy Merril, not to mention some truly wonderful Japanese hosts and Russian co-guests. I don’t ask for better companions.

  Well. No one wants to see anyone else’s travel slides, and I don’t suppose you would sit still for very much reminiscing about Caribbean cruises with Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov and the Heinleins, or about the quaint old man who was curator of a rose garden outside Tbilisi, in Soviet Georgia. I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to hear it, either. But the point is that toward the end of the 1960s I was beginning to get bored with my job. Traveling made it bearable. But most of the traveling was only indirectly connected with editing Galaxy and If. I would lose little if I left, I pondered. So why was I staying on?