Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (28 page)

So we find ourselves today, standing here in our T-shirts, donkey jackets, and chinos, without the bold scenarios we enjoyed when the moon was young and untrodden. Those bold scenarios have effectively migrated to the wide-open spaces of the cinema screen, the circular spaces of the DVD.
Alien,
with its scrubby spaceship full of ill-dressed crew, bears a Dick hallmark. The
Terminator
franchise, based on an old SF idea.
Star Wars,
owing much to Doc Smith’s
Lensman
series.
Matrix,
a dark Dickian idea. Other one-offs, debasing Dick’s concepts—remember
Total Recall?
We’ll say nothing of
AI,
debasing
my
ideas. . . .

Of course, I simplify. Every writer worth his salt slightly changes the timbre of our uniform voice. While fans naturally always want more of the same, a real writer needs his individuality to be acknowleged (and to be loved, or else to hell with them!). I wrote
Billion Year Spree,
my history of science fiction, not only for my love, my obsessive love, of the field, but to distance myself from what I regarded as the rubbish of
Ralph 124C41+,
to clear a space in which I could live and breathe and create. And what goes for me goes for Cordwainer Smith, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Bishop, James Morrow, China Miéville, any number of other writers. And despite all the changes, the dwindling of space-travel narratives, SF continues on its surreal way much as it ever did—as indeed the great world does, give or take a few suicide bombers.

So now we work on in black and white, we and our computers, to appear modestly on the printed page. Is it better or worse than it was? Will it be better in the future? I can answer that one with assurance:
Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose
. . .

B
ack in the days when I made my first professional sale to a science fiction magazine, which was in . . .

Well, let’s think about that date for a moment. What I sold was a poem. I wrote it in 1935. It was accepted by T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., the editor of
Amazing Stories,
in 1936. It was published in 1937 (in their October issue) . . . and paid for—in the amount of two dollars—in early 1938. So at some time over that period, however minimally, I made my first professional sale and thus became eligible to join in the wonderful world of the science fiction pro.

That world, of course, was most wonderful only in the eyes of the yearning unpublished. There was certainly nothing wondrous about its financial aspects, because those in fact were pretty sad. In the mid-thirties there were three science fiction magazines. One was the monthly
Astounding,
the class of the field, which paid a lordly penny a word on acceptance for all it bought. The other two,
Amazing Stories
and
Wonder Stories,
were bimonthlies that paid only half as much a word, and didn’t pay at all until the work was actually published. Occasionally not even then.

I once did the arithmetic on these financial matters, and it came out pretty discouraging. The three magazines together generated something around ten thousand dollars a year to pour into the collective coffers of the period’s SF writers. If you add in the income from such subsidiary rights as book publication, foreign-language translations, and motion-picture sales, you come up with a yearly total of . . . well, still ten thousand dollars, because the American SF writers of the 1930s never saw any of that kind of money. With negligible exceptions, the only science fiction published in book form in America in the 1930s was by English authors, and the other kinds of subsidiary-rights income didn’t exist at all.

Even so (you may think) ten thousand dollars, especially ten thousand of the dollars of the 1930s, worth so much more apiece than our own inflated twenty-first-century play money, was not a contemptible sum. Indeed it was not. If any single writer had gotten it all he could have lived a kingly existence, perhaps with a staff of servants to take care of all the nonpleasurable parts of his daily life, conceivably with a pied-à-terre in Paris as well and maybe a winter place in the Florida keys. (Well, maybe not
all
of that, but pretty kingly all the same.)

Unfortunately that ten grand didn’t go to a single writer; it was divided among sixty or seventy impecunious individuals. The average income for a 1930s science fiction writer was somewhere between three and four dollars a week. A few of the most prolific of the pulpsters—Arthur J. Burks, L. Ron Hubbard, and hardly anybody else—did better, but not out of science fiction alone. Most of what they wrote went to the magazines of the more popular pulp categories (detective, Western, sports, even love stories) as well as to the SF ones . . . and were the result of long daily hours pounding those old typewriter keys. In the lap of luxury no American science fiction writer resided in the 1930s.

That’s the bad part. There was a good part, though, and that was that science fiction was catching on.

Not in book publishing, of course—that didn’t happen until after World War II—and certainly not in any other of the subrights. But there was a sudden and wholly unexpected florescence of more of the same. New pulp SF magazines began popping up all over the place, until by the end of the decade there were some twenty of the things.

This did not mean great enrichment for the writers. The new magazines were almost all bimonthlies, if that; few of them lasted more than a handful of issues; their payment rates were uniformly at the low end of the already low publishing scale (Don Wollheim’s two magazines, in fact, budgeted no payment at all for writers) . . . and the number of new writers entering the field was increasing as rapidly as the number of magazines, so that, instead of enriching the existing pros, the new outlets were pretty much just spreading the poverty around.

The spirit of change was not limited to the new magazine pop-ups, either. By the end of the decade all three of the canonical magazines—
Amazing, Astounding, Wonder
—were still around, but all three of them were under new, and significantly different, management.

T. O’Conor Sloane had been an editor, then
the
editor, of
Amazing
almost since its inception. He was eighty-six years old when he bought that pivotal bit of poetry from me—beard long and white, fingers trembling, and mind pretty firmly locked into the late nineteenth century. (He was convinced that spaceflight was a physical impossibility.) Mailing me that tiny check may have been one of the last things he did as
Amazing
’s editor, because early in 1938 the magazine was sold to the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company of Chicago, and Sloane was out of a job.

His replacement was Raymond A. Palmer, who may or may not have believed in space travel but definitely did believe (or came to believe) that the stories by Richard S. Shaver that he published, dealing with great swarms of deranged robots that lived under the surface of the Earth and had malevolent plans for the human race, weren’t fiction at all. Although Palmer also published straight SF stories by old-timers like Eando Binder and newcomers like the teenage Isaac Asimov, it is the “Shaver mysteries” that define his tenure.

Wonder Stories
throughout most of the period was owned by Hugo Gernsback and, under his watchful eye, edited by the fairly undistinguished Charles D. Hornig. Like
Amazing,
it had seen better days, but then, when it was sold to the Thrilling Group in mid-decade, its fortunes changed. Its new editor was Leo Margulies, and its title was, of course, changed to
Thrilling Wonder Stories. Thrilling Wonder
wasn’t the only magazine Margulies edited; the company owned forty-five others, and Margulies was listed as the editor of all forty-six of them. (With, it is true, a large stable of assistants—including at one time or another H. L. Gold, Mort Weisinger, Samuel Mines, and half a dozen others.) But Margulies’s was the guiding intelligence. He had no particular interest in science fiction, but he knew what he wanted from its writers. It was the same thing he demanded from his Western and mystery and air-war authors, and it could be summed up in one word:

Action.

Margulies had no objection to stories with a social message (as, for instance, Heinlein’s “Jerry Is a Man”) or to interesting new kinds of planets and alien creatures (like John Campbell’s tour of the solar system in his “Penton and Blake” series or Stanley Weinbaum’s superintelligent Venusian plants). All he insisted on was that, if the writer was determined to have his characters debate alien customs, they should do so while having a ray-gun battle with the aliens. It was his conviction that his pulp readership, whatever the genre, was composed principally of eleven-year-olds, thus such childishness as his “Sergeant Saturn” letter columns.

But there was one editor who considered his readers to be capable of adult thought (even though not of being exposed to matters of adult sexuality). That was John Campbell.
Astounding
was lucky in having had the great good fortune of being picked up by the high-end pulp chain of Street & Smith when Clayton, its original publisher, went belly-up, luckier still when, in 1938, it was given over to John W. Campbell, Jr., to edit. Campbell is generally considered the greatest editor science fiction has ever seen, and perhaps his willingness to consider his readers grown-ups is why. Campbell’s editoral policy, he himself said, was to publish stories that could be read as contemporary fiction, but in a magazine of the twenty-fifth century. And he came pretty close.

That was then. Now it’s the twenty-first century and much has changed almost unrecognizably. Money, for instance. Even when inflation is discounted, now there is much, much more of it to spread around, and it comes not only from the handful of surviving specialist magazines but from book publishers, television and movie producers, and even such grace notes as lecture fees and corporate consultancies. Respectability: Even the most elevated of literatures will now sometimes admire certain science fiction stories, provided only that they are permitted to deny that those stories are SF at all. Accessibility: In the 1930s a beginning writer who had not yet persuaded any of the paying magazines to take on any of his stories—the young Ray Bradbury, say—had only one recourse, which was to publish them, free, in a (typically mimeographed) fan magazine, where they would be read by perhaps a couple of dozen human beings. Now the World Wide Web has provided countless e-publishers. Often the payment is the same—that’s to say, somewhere around zero—but the readership may now be in the thousands.

So in that way and in most others it is now a considerably better world for the average SF writer. Easy, no . . . but then if it were really easy everybody would be doing it, and what would be the fun of that?

N
ew writer Christopher Rowe was born in Kentucky and lives there still. With Gwenda Bond, he operates a small press and edits the critically acclaimed magazine
Say
. His stories have appeared in
SCI FICTION, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, Idomancer, Swan Sister, Trampoline, The Infinite Matrix, The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives,
and elsewhere, and have recently been collected in
Bittersweet Creek
.