The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (3 page)

But I've always wondered who was turned out of the municipal lodging house to make room for my friend.

And all this had its effect on science fiction, not only on my own work but on that of many writers; not only in affecting moods and themes but in practical, tangible ways. Magazines were a Depression business. If you couldn't afford fifty cents to take the family to the movies, you could probably scrape up a dime or twenty cents to buy a magazine, and then pass the magazine back and forth to multiply the investment. And talk was cheap. One reason for the growth of science-fiction fan clubs in the 30s was that you could get an evening's worth of entertainment out of two nickels spent on the subway.

There is a populist, anti-establishment tone to a lot of the science fiction of the 30s, and in fact to all science fiction everywhere. One of the reasons has to do with its flowering in an age in which anyone could plainly see that the Establishment had screwed up the world. Rich people got a very bad press in almost all newspapers, magazines, books, plays, and films, and nowhere worse than in science fiction. Rich people were "Steel"—power behind villainous Blackie DuQuesne and evil adversaries of good, pure Richard Ballinger Seaton—in
The Skylark of Space
. They were the pitifully empty Eloi of
The Time Machine
, the smug and corrupt legless master race of
The Revolt of the Pedestrians
, the maniac gulgul-collectors of
The Blue Barbarians
.

Of course, that tradition is older than the Depression,
*
but the climate of the times encouraged it, and even encouraged that kind of thinking about the unthinkable which is one of the hallmarks of some kinds of science fiction: talk of social change. The 30s seethed with proponents of social change: Anarchists and Technocrats, Single-Taxers and four or five brands of Marxists, Father Coughlin and Upton Sinclair, Ham and Eggs and Thirty Dollars Every Thursday. Science fiction both reflected and sparked events in the outside world. When you invent a new civilized planet, you have to invent a new society to inhabit it; when you invent a new society, you make a political statement about the one you live in. Every writer is in some sense a preacher. (Why else would anyone write a book?) With or without intent, with or without awareness of what they were doing, the science-fiction writers were preaching.

James Blish once had a theory that science-fiction writing was the specific consequence of some historical event, as Parkinson's Syndrome was considered to be the late aftereffect of the world influenza epidemic of 1920. He could not identify the event, but he based his theory on the observation that, of all major science-fiction writers alive a decade or two ago, more than half had been born within a year or two of 1920.

Jim's theory doesn't now seem as plausible as it did when he proposed it, because there are too many new writers showing their faces: Samuel R. Delany, Larry Niven, even a few who were actually being born just about when Jim was developing his theory, such as George R. R. Martin. But there's some truth to it, at least in the sense that science fiction does clearly show the impact of the social confusion and experimentation of the 30s. For all of us who were born between, say 1915 and 1920—Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and a lot of others—the world of the 30s, which was the world of the Great Depression, was where we grew up, and where we formed our conceptions of the universe.

2 Let There Be Fandom

In the Beginning there was Hugo Gernsback, and he begat
Amazing Stories
.

In the fullness of time, about three years' worth, a Depression smote the land, and
Amazing
was riven from him in a stock shuffle; whereupon he begat
Air Wonder Stories
and
Science Wonder Stories
, looked upon them and found them incomplete, and joined them one unto the other to be one flesh, named
Wonder Stories
. And Hugo looked upon the sales figures of
Wonder Stories
and pondered mightily that they were so low. Whereupon a Voice spake unto him, saying, "Hugo, nail those readers down," so that he begat the Science Fiction League, and thus was Fandom born.

If there had not been a Science Fiction League, it would have been necessary to invent one. The time was ripe. In the early 30s, to be a science-fiction reader was a sad and lonely thing. There weren't many of us, and we hadn't found each other to talk to. A few activists had tried to get something going, digging addresses out of the letter columns of the science-fiction magazines and starting tiny correspondence clubs, but the largest of them had maybe a dozen members, and for the rest of us we had the permanent consciousness of being alone in a hostile world. The hordes of the unblessed weren't merely disinterested in science fiction, they ridiculed it.

From Gernsback's point of view, what he had to sell was a commodity that a few people wanted very much indeed but most people wouldn't accept if it were given away free. He couldn't do a lot about recruiting new readers, but he was aware that there were a great many in-and-outers, people who would buy an issue of
Wonder Stories
now and then, and thus were obviously prime prospects, but had not formed the every-month addiction that he sought. Well, sir. The arithmetic of that situation was pretty easy to figure. If the seventy percent of his readers who averaged three issues a year could be persuaded to buy every issue, he would
triple
his sales. These were the visions of sugarplums that danced in Hugo Gernsback's mind. He had a special need to think of something, because by the early 30s even the magazine industry was grinding down under the Depression. Even the science-fiction magazines. Three of them existed, but they were reducing their size, cutting their prices, dropping back from monthly to every-other-month publication; in 1933
Astounding
went out of business entirely, and then for a brief little while there were only two. (A few months later Street & Smith bought the magazine from the wreckage of the Clayton group of pulps and started it up again.) What Hugo hoped for from the Science Fiction League was a plain buck-hustle, a way of keeping readers loyal.

What we fans hoped for from it was Paradise. As soon as the notice appeared I rushed to join, but my membership number was 490, even so. I didn't mind. I was thrilled to think that there were 489 others like me, when I had in my whole life seen only one or two. The announcement promised that chapters would be chartered in all major cities; club news would be published in every issue of the magazine, members would be encouraged to become each other's pen pals—what fun! Hugo promised that some of the members would be foreign—imagine discussing
Spacehounds of IPC
or
The Man Who Awoke
with someone who lived in England or Australia! Imagine joining a chapter, sitting in a room filled with people who knew what you meant when you used terms like "time machines" or "ray guns," and didn't laugh! Imagine just knowing people who did not think science fiction was junk.

But, you know, in all honesty, a lot of it was.

Although I have devoted my life to science fiction, I don't
like
all of it. What I do like I often like very much, but that is only a minor fraction of what is written and published. Ted Sturgeon defined the situation exactly, in what has come to be called Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then ninety percent of everything is crud."

John Campbell used to say that he was the world's greatest expert on bad science fiction because he had read more of it than anyone else alive. He based his claim on having read
Astounding
's slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts, eighty or ninety of them every week, for thirty-four straight years, and surely no one else could challenge that record while he lived. But now John has gone to that great editorial resting place in the sky, and I think I may have inherited his mantle. I don't really know how much I have read, but the best estimate I can make is that, allowing for everything—books, magazines, unpublished manuscripts, everything—I must have read something in excess of 5 x 10
⁸
words of science fiction in my life. That's half a billion words, or almost twice as many as are contained in all the books published in the United States in any one year.

Even so, even after all of that, every now and then something grabs me around the groin, compels my full attention, and does not let me go. Not until I have finished the story, at least, and if it is really good,
not even then
. (What is best about the best science fiction is not merely the pleasure it gives while you are reading it, but the long serial thoughts it stirs in the mind of the reader for days and months afterward.) Because I have read so much, that doesn't happen very often any more, but it still does happen. There are still new thoughts to be comprehended and new insights to be explored.

But in the early 1930s—for me as one fledgling, but for almost all science-fiction readers simply because the field itself was so new—almost
all
the ideas were new! Revelation followed revelation. Fresh perception piled on revolutionary insight.

It is quite possible, I realize, that some of the ideation in
Air Wonder
or
Astounding Stories of Super-Science
was not quite as fresh and innovative as it seemed at the time. There was (and still is) much borrowing, which the more naive among the readers (myself certainly included) were simply not equipped to recognize.

No matter. Whether or not the satirists borrowed from Voltaire and the adventure writers cribbed from Verne and the humanists copied their perceptions of feeling from
True Story
—no matter how hallowed or tawdry the sources, no matter how often the story had been told, to us it was still the first time. This is what is now diagnosable as the
Star Trek
syndrome. As science fiction goes,
Star Trek
isn't much. There's not a fresh idea in all the three years of it put together, nothing that has not been done before, and usually much better, in the pages of some science-fiction magazine or book. But the people who saw
Star Trek
numbered
forty million
. The overwhelming majority of them had never been exposed to anything like it before. They had never really thought about the possibility of life on other planets, or time travel, or what it would be like to cruise through space, or how other societies might resemble (or differ from) our own, until they caught it on the boob tube, and to them it was Revelation. To them. To us, decades earlier. Above all, to me.

When you have that sort of experience, your very glands shriek out to share it—cellar Christians whispering the Gospel by the flickering light of oil lamps—and so the Science Fiction League fell on ripe ground. We were, boy, ready!

Sadly, the Science Fiction League did not in the long run do much for
Wonder Stories
. The readers joined up, but they did not recruit new ones; and the ones who joined were unanimously the ones who had been reading every issue, anyway. The magazine limped along for a few more years, stalling its creditors and underpaying its writers when it paid them at all, and before the end of the decade was sold to the knacking shop of the Thrilling Group.

But whatever the SFL did for Gernsback, it did an awful lot for us practitioners of the solitary vice of science fiction. It got us out of the closet and into Fandom, leading directly to such group orgies as the worldcons of today, with casts of thousands openly engaged in the celebration of sf.

I had, as it happened, met one or two fellow fans before that.

One was a boy in my eighth-grade class in Public School 9 in Brooklyn. That was a close-knit class to begin with, because we were all united in a bond of common terror. Our teacher, Maude Mary Mahlman, was nine feet tall, ferocious of mien, and possessed of compound eyes, like a fly, so that even when she seemed to be looking at the blackboard or a student across the room, at least one facet was always and unwinkingly fixed on
me
. She told us that herself, and I believed every word she said. For a time. Then my courage came back. By the end of the term I had learned to look industrious when daydreaming, and I actually wrote a short science-fiction story, my very first, under her eyes on a drowsy May morning in English class. (The story had something to do with Atlantis. That's all I remember, except that it was awful.)

In the same class, Owen Jordan sat nearby, and lived nearby to my home. We would walk home together and sometimes stop off at his house or mine to play chess, and he was the one who tuned me in to the existence of the magazine I had not previously known existed,
Astounding
. The first issue he loaned me had a cover illustrating the story "Manape the Mighty," and so naive (or despairing) was I that I read only that story and returned it to him before he pointed out that all the other stories in the issue were science fiction. But we lost touch shortly after that. We graduated from grammar school, and I went off to Brooklyn Tech.

There was no high school specializing in science fiction, which is what really interested me. There was not yet even a High School of Science, and perhaps that's a pity, because I think I might have liked being a physicist or an astronomer. What there was, was Brooklyn Technical High School. It was said to give many courses in science, which I recognized as being some part of science fiction, and besides, it was an honor school, requiring a special examination for entrance, which appealed to my twelve-year-old snob soul.

Brooklyn Tech was a revolutionary concept in high schools, dedicated to the quick manufacture of technologists. In 1932 its own building was still under construction, and it was housed temporarily in a sprawl of out-of-date schools and one abandoned factory, at the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge, where the laboratories and workshops could be accommodated.