Before the Universe

INTRODUCTION

In the late 1930s in New York City, a bunch of us kids, fans anxious to become twos, joined together in The Futurian Society of New York. Don Wollheim was the "old man" of the group. He had been old enough to vote in the presidential election of 1936; most of the rest of us wouldn't make it for several years thereafter. The other members included Dirk Wylie, Robert W. Lowndes, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson, John B. Michel—well, the story of the Futurians has been told often enough.* (* And is the subject of a forthcoming nonfiction book by Damon Knight.)

And to us was drawn, around 1938, a young, plump, bright fellow from the farthest north part of Manhattan you can be in without striking the Bronx, Cyril Kornbluth.

In 1939 I became editor of two P*R*O*F*E*S*S*I*O*N*A*L science fiction magazines called Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. They were low-budget projects in every respect. The magazines sold for a dime and fifteen cents respectively, and paid their writers (and me) accordingly. In order to acquire enough stories to put an issue together without leaving a sizeable fraction of the pages blank, I had to beat the bushes for cheap talent. The first and most obvious place to beat was within The Futurian Society. In putting together one issue, I found myself ten thousand words short, and had something like $35 left in my budget to buy a story with. So I took my troubles to the fannish commune on Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, where half a dozen of the Futurians lived, and Cyril Kornbluth and Dick Wilson undertook to fill the hole for me. They stayed up all night, each banging away on his own typewriter. I have never known the exact circumstances, but as I understand it Dick Wilson started on page one and Cyril started on page twenty, and somehow they managed to make the ends match up in the middle. It came out to a precise ten thousand words, and was entitled "Stepsons of Mars." They signed it with the joint pen name of "Ivar Towers"—the name of the commune, you see, was "The Ivory Tower"—and I published it. I would not say the story was good. But even at that stage both Cyril and Dick were gifted enough with words so that it wasn't utterly bad. The reader mail dealt with it no more harshly, or kindly, than with any of the other stories in the issue.

I don't think it was the first Futurian collaboration. We had all been collaborating with each other from time to time. Any two Futurians might match up to produce a story. If they found the going rough, they might well call in any other, or any several others. There was one story in which, if my memory does not play me false, something like seven of us claimed a share before it was published. As an editor I was hospitable to all Futurians, being one of them myself. So were Don Wollheim and Doc Lowndes, when shortly thereafter they acquired magazines of their own to edit; but we managed to sell stories from time to time even to non-Futurian editors. I made sales, alone or in collaboration, to Amazing, Astounding, and Planet Stories. Wollheim and Michel sold to Astounding, Lowndes to Unknown, Asimov was beginning to sell to everybody, mostly alone (he was always a strange one, Isaac was), but once or twice in collaboration with me. Etcetera. There was a lot of talent in the Futurians. And a lot of it was concentrated in the person of Cyril Kornbluth.

I remember some of Cyril's nonprofessional production at that time. Strange little essays, quirky "almost-stories", poetry. Some of it was doggerel, but funny doggerel, as in the one he called "Gym Class":

One, two, three, four,

Flap your arms and prance,

In stinky shirt and stinky shoes

And stinky little pants.

Some of it was lushly sexual, as in a poem—I think it was called "Elephanta," but I cannot now say why—which began:

How long, my love, shall I behold this wall

Between our gardens, yours the rose

And mine the swooning

And some of it was simply brilliant. As far as I know, it is almost all lost, but it would repay someone to search through the Futurian fan magazines of the period to see if any might still be found.

The first published story by Cyril and me was Before the Universe. (It is included in this volume.) We worked out an assembly line procedure: I wrote an "action chart"—essentially a plot outline, with some indication of characters and setting—from which Cyril wrote a first draft, which I then revised and retyped ... and, more often than not, published. When "Before the- Universe" reached print, the reader mail was satisfactory, if not wildly enthusiastic, and we decided to continue the series with "Nova Midplane" and "The Extrapolated Dimwit," also both included here.

At the same time we were writing other stories together, sometimes with a third party; and we were both also writing extensively with others or alone. I really don't know how many stories we wrote during the period covered by this book, which all in all was only about three years, late 1939 through 1942. According to my records, about twenty-six science fiction stories which I wrote (in whole or in part) did get published during that period. (Cyril and most of the other Futurians stayed pretty close to science fiction. I wandered. I was also writing for the detective, horror, fantasy, air war, sports, and love pulps at that time—everything but Westerns, which I simply could not bring myself to do. It wasn't so much that I wanted to appear in them as that I wanted to test myself to see if I could survive outside the SF ambience.) Cyril's total must have been similar.

Nearly everything Cyril and I wrote together got published. After all, once I was finished revising it there was at least one editor who, by definition, was pleased with it. So if it didn't sell somewhere else the first time or two out, it always sold to me. But there were a few stories which we did not finish for one reason or another (some of which we came back to much later, and are in the other volume* (* Critical Mass, Bantam Books.)), and at least one story which we finished but never published, because it got lost. It was called "Under the Sequoias. " (Neither Cyril nor I had ever seen a sequoia, but then we hadn't actually seen the surface of Mars, either.) It had something to do with a superior race of beings who lived underground. Actually I think it was one of the best stories we wrote together at that time, but that may be only memory beautifying truth. At any rate, I have little hope of ever reading it again.

We wrote another story about a man who used some chemical to precipitate oxygen out of the air in the form of snow, and jell the ocean as warm ice (ah, there, Kurt Vonnegut), but unfortunately it had to do with the impending crisis between the United States and Japan, and before we got it printed Pearl Harbor put it out of date. So we tore it up.

All the other early stories we wrote in collaboration without other partners (plus two on which we called in a third hand) are herein. I hope you will read them gently, gentle reader. They are our youth.