The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (11 page)

By that time I was beginning to earn a few dollars here and there from writing.

You must understand that when I say a "few" dollars, I mean so few that each separate one was an event. There were many people who were earning pitifully small incomes in the late 30s, but not very many who earned less than I. The next step below my annual income was zero.

But the difference between "nothing" and "almost nothing" is very large. And it got bigger as I went along, jumping almost an order of magnitude a year. A few dollars in 1937, a few tens of dollars in 1938, a few hundred in 1939—well, boy! If that rate of economic growth had only continued, I would now be earning, let me see, something like $10
⁴⁰
this year, or roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the gross global product.

It has not worked out that way. But I had established the principle that money could somehow be earned out of the writing business; it was only necessary to increase the flow. Writing was unreliable, and I had not yet aspired to editing, but I had heard of the existence of such a thing as a literary agent.

I had never seen one, and had no very clear idea of what anybody needed one of these creatures for, but the theory seemed simple. You persuaded writers to give you their stories, and you sent them out to editors. When an editor bought one, you then sent the check to the writer, deducting ten percent for your trouble.

That seemed as if it should be easier work for the dollar than writing. I calculated that if I had nine clients and sold an aggregate of a thousand dollars' worth of their work, they would each have averaged one hundred dollars net. And so would I! That was a fascinating revelation. It meant that if I had nine writers as clients, I would be earning as much as if I were a writer myself. (I have always been good at figures.
*
)

I knew that a literary agency was a business, and a business needed printed letterheads and cards. That was no problem. Johnny Michel's father had remarried and the new wife sort of preferred Johnny out of the house, so he had come to live in the spare room of our apartment and brought his Kelsey 3x5 flatbed printing press along. He taught me how to set type, and so I set up and printed my own letterheads and even business cards. I was all set, except for the lack of any clients.

My first client was myself. I could see that it didn't look good for an agent to be peddling the work of only one writer, especially if he was the writer, but I devised a way around that. I had always thought it a romantic notion to write under pseudonyms, and I could have ten instant clients simply by signing ten of my stories with different names. It didn't matter particularly that I did that. None of them sold, anyway, in those years.

Then there were the Futurians. They didn't like wasting money on postage stamps any more than W. L. Perrin and Son, and most of them were willing to let me risk my efforts on the problematical results. Out of their collective resources I made one or two tiny sales. At the time of the first "convention" in Philadelphia, I had met a young fan named Milton A. Rothman, just out of high school and torn between colleges. He had won a science scholarship to Penn and a music scholarship to Juilliard: did he want to be a physicist or a pianist? He finally settled for physics, but what he really wanted to be was a science-fiction writer. He gave me a couple of his stories. I didn't just market them, I actually rewrote them (we had agreed on a twenty-percent share for me in the event of sale, somewhere between agent's fee and collaborator's half), and, my God, I sold them both. And to
Astounding
, at that.
*
By then I had begun to meet a few pros, and I wheedled rejects out of them.

It made a certain amount of sense for the pros, because the science-fiction market was in one of its recurrent flare-star periods, and you really needed to be on the scene to find out who was hungry for manuscripts.
Wonder Stories
had been taken over by the Thrilling Group. It had developed some distressing comic-book aspects (the letter column was conducted by a "Sergeant Saturn"), but it was solvent, and they had even added a couple of companion magazines,
Startling Stories
and
Captain Future
. F. Orlin Tremaine, having left
Astounding
and all of Street & Smith, was starting a new magazine called
Comet
. Malcolm Reiss had entered the field with
Planet Stories
; a new fellow named Robert O. Erisman had a couple of titles,
Marvel
and
Dynamic
; even Hugo Gernsback was coming back into the field for the third time. (After the war, he went for number four.) With all these customers I found homes for an occasional script. Put them all together, and they added up to—

Well, not very much. In actual dollars and cents I had earned more running errands for W. L. Perrin and Son. But it was more interesting work, and it gave me entry into the offices of real flesh-and-blood editors.

When you speak of science-fiction editors in the later 1930s, you are really talking about one man, and his name was John W. Campbell, Jr.

Science fiction has had a great many idiosyncratic editors. Some have wound up on the funny farm. One or two have landed in jail. A few have been very good, many have been competent, and a
lot
have brought to their craft the creativity of a toad and the intelligence of a flatworm. John stands above them all. By any measure you can name, he was the greatest editor science fiction has ever had.

He was also quirky, gullible, susceptible to attacks of bigotry, and given to long stretches of apathy. First and last, John edited
Astounding/Analog
for thirty-four straight years. That's too long. No one can hold a job like that without at least an occasional sabbatical year to renew one's perceptions of the world and repair one's soul. John showed the strain. Sometimes for years on end he would edit the magazine with a maximum of twenty-five percent of his attention, maybe less than that. John swallowed whole such magnolious nonsense as dianetics, the Hieronymous machine, and the John Birch Society. There were a lot of things about him that were funny: his private under-the-counter bottle of ketchup at the branch of Chock full o' Nuts where he was accustomed to take his lunch. None of that matters. You can't be better than the best, and John was the best there was.

When John became editor of
Astounding
in 1937, he had already been well established as a writer, with at first a keen sense of gadgetry and no clue as to what went on inside a human being. He began while still an undergraduate at MIT and rapidly took over the Number Two position, behind Doc Smith, as the leading spot-weld-me-another-busbar space-opera author. There was no living in that, of course—remember what writers were getting in the 1930s. So John sold second-hand cars, or did whatever he had to do, to supplement his half cent a word, promptly on lawsuit, from Hugo Gernsback.

To me, in 1936, Campbell was a hero, in the sense that every science-fiction writer was a hero, but not a big hero like Doc Smith, say, or Stanton A. Coblentz. His space operas were fine fun, but Smith had been there first. His shorter works were not particularly distinguished.
*

Then, all of a sudden, upheaval. There was a high-level tremor at Street & Smith. Tremaine was kicked upstairs, and John Campbell was hired to succeed him.

I didn't like that much, because I had been getting along very well with Tremaine and doubted I would do any better with the new boy.
†
But it was worth a try, so I trotted up to the familiar decrepit office building, a few blocks from the women's prison, and was admitted to The Presence. As I came into the office John rolled down his desk top, swiveled around in his chair, pointed to a seat, fitted a cigarette into his holder, and said, "Television will never replace radio in the home. I'll bet you don't know why."

That set the pattern. Over the next few years, and intermittently for much longer, I made the pilgrimage to John's office and was greeted each time with some such opening remark. The conversation always went the same way:

Gee, no, Mr. Campbell, I never thought of that.

Right, Pohl, and no one else did, either. But what is the audience for radio?

Uh—

(Rueful shake of the head.) The
primary
audience is bored housewives. They turn the radio on to keep them company while they do the dishes.

Yeah, I guess that's right, all r—

And the point (warming up, jabbing the cigarette toward me) is, you can't
ignore
television! You have to
look
at it!

After a few such conversations, and after reading the editorials in
Astounding
a month or two after each of them, I figured out what was happening. That was how John Campbell wrote the editorials. On the first of every month he would choose a polemical notion. For three weeks he would spring it on everyone who walked in. Arguments were dealt with, objections overcome, weak points shored up—and ,by the end of each month he had a mighty blast proof-tested against a dozen critics.

I didn't mind that. Actually, I admired it a lot. I filed it away in my mind as one of the smart things editors did, and very quickly it appeared that there were a lot of smart things John did.

Every word he said I memorized:

On atmosphere:
"I
hate
a story that begins with
atmosphere
. Get right into the story, never mind the
atmosphere
."

On motivating writers:
"The trouble with Bob Heinlein is that he doesn't need to write. When I want a story from him, the first thing I have to do is think up something he would like to have, like a swimming pool. The second thing is to sell him on the idea of having it. The third thing is to convince him he should write a story to get the money to pay for it, instead of building it himself."

On rejection letters:
"When there's something wrong with a story, I can tell you how to fix it. When it just doesn't come across, there's nothing I can say."

On plot ideas:
"When I think of a story idea, I give it to six different writers. It doesn't matter if all six of them write it. They'll all be different stories, anyway, and I'll publish all six of them."

On the archetypal sf story:
"I want the kind of story that could be printed in a magazine of the year two thousand a.d. as a contemporary adventure story. No gee-whiz, just take the technology for granted."

He was also a fount of information on the technological infrastructure of publishing: line engraving, halftones, four-color separations, binding machines. I had never known anyone else who knew about these things, and I learned from him as from Jesus on the Mount. He was a great teacher. Later I figured out why. He was learning the same things, too, maybe forty-eight hours ahead of me on the track, rehearsing his own learning by teaching it to me. When John took over
Astounding
he was around twenty-seven, very junior to every other editor at Street & Smith. He must have got, and must have needed, the reassurance he found in people like me, like Isaac Asimov, like the dozens of other writers and would-be writers who took the subway to 79 Seventh Avenue and were even more junior than he.

Even at seventeen I perceived that he was not wholly without seam or flaw. I had a nice little racket going with Street & Smith, because my friend Pudna Abbot worked in the circulation department there. She could bring home the newest copy of
Astounding
as soon as it came off the press, a full three weeks before the official release date. Not only did I get my copies before any other kid on the block, but I got them free.
*
Unfortunately I made the mistake of bragging about it to John. He put a stop to it. That was the first time I was ever disappointed in him. I wouldn't have done that. It showed a lack of class.

John's tackier side has had a lot of exposure in the last few years. I sat with him all through a banquet in California, two or three years ago, while the principal speaker denounced John for anti-semitism. John
_to
ok it imperturbably enough, but I didn't think that showed much class on the part of the speaker, either.

Was John a bigot?

I have no doubt that he was always a little embarrassed by people who didn't have the sense to be born white, male, and Protestant. Like most WASPs of his generation, he was brought up to believe that blacks were shiftless and Jews kind of comical. But I do not believe that he ever in his life withheld any obligation or courtesy on the grounds of race or religion. But he wasn't sure that his readership (who he assumed were also largely WASPs) were as tolerant as he. So he invited his Jewish writers to conceal that blemish. When I sold him Milt Rothman's first story, he laid it on the line. "The best names," John declared, "are Scottish or English. That's true for characters and for bylines. It has nothing to do with prejudice. They
sound
better." It was not just for Milt that he insisted on that. It is only because Isaac Asimov and Stanley G. Weinbaum were first published elsewhere that we don't know them now as, maybe, Tam MacIsaacs and S. G. Macbeth.