In the Problem Pit

This us a sort of reminiscence of what the world of science fiction has been like over the last 30 or 40 years — or at least, that part of it that 1 inhabited. We are all being encouraged to write our autobiographies these days — it is part of the "age of respectability" — and some of us are proving very easy to persuade. By publishing this short sketch here, I hope to postpone my own succumbing by at least, oh, umm, maybe a month.

When the Apollo 15 astronauts landed on the moon they named craters after characters and scenes in stories by Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Heinlein, Verne, Frank Herbert, and E. E. Smith. University libraries beg the privilege of collecting the papers of science-fiction writers. Routinely we get called on to keynote a scientific gathering or advise large corporations on how to run their affairs. We are very Establishment, these days. So much so that when I teach my college course in science fiction and divide the history of sf into four eras, the name I use for the present stage is the Age of Respectability.

It was not always thus. Time was when science fiction was one pulp category out of a dozen, no more respectable than sports or horror, nowhere near as financially successful as the detectives and the westerns. The magazines typically had names like Thrilling Wonder Stories or Super Science Stories. The covers matched the titles. A typical scene would be a fire-eyed monster covered with green scales, crashing through the window of a spaceship intent on the rape of a terror-stricken blonde in a stainless-steel bra. How did we get from there to here?

It was not a straight line. It was a couple of quantum jumps that really didn't seem like much at the time to us who lived through them (is a germ in an astronaut's bloodstream aware that he has gone to the moon and back?), but have come since to be looked on as golden ages in science fiction. For the world in general these golden ages were gritty, troublesome times; one coincided with the buildup and first disastrous years of the second World War, the other with the sullen McCarthy period in the United States; there was little joy in either, for most people. But for science fiction they were yeasty times ...

As far as I am concerned, the first golden age began around 1937. Probably the dating is personal to me; it happens that 1937 was when I first made a professional appearance, with a poem in Amazing Stories. But that's close enough, and all the dates are a little fuzzy. (Even that date, because as it happens I wrote the poem in 1935, and it was accepted in 1936, and published in 1937—and paid for in 1938, because that was how things went in those days.) It was around that time, at any rate, that John Campbell took over Astounding Stories from F. Orlin Tremaine; the Thrilling Group's editorial collective of Leo Margulies, Mort Weisinger, and others had replaced father figure Hugo Gemsback himself on Wonder Stories; Raymond A. Palmer was about to acquire Amazing Stories from white-bearded T. O'Conor Sloane, Ph.D. And then or in the next couple of years, writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and a dozen others, better known or less, were about to make their debuts.

It wasn't only in the titles and the covers of the magazines that science fiction was a different breed of cat then. The craftsmanship was poorer. Thematically, it was limited. Large areas of discussion common in today's science fiction simply did not then exist: race, for one. If a black man appeared in a 1937 sf story he was likely to be either a villain or a shambling Stepin Fetchit figure of low comedy—or if neither of those, he was certain to come from Mars. Sex was a dirty word. It existed on the covers, but inside the magazines it was important mostly for its consequences: usually a state of mind which caused the principal boy to invent space travel so that he could win the principal girl. What he did with her after he won her was not described.

These were areas of science fiction which were not explored because they were off limits. There were other areas, and more important ones, which writers did not investigate because they didn't know they were there. In sf as in any other creative effort, today's practitioners stand on the shoulders of their predecessors. None of the kinds of sf that we write today fell as a gift from heaven. Each was given to us by some single writer somewhere in the world who woke up one morning and proceeded to invent a new kind of sf story, and some of them were just doing the inventing at that time. Their insights and innovations provided capital on which all of us have since drawn.

For instance, there was A. E. Van Vogt, a young Canadian who had been reading science fiction for some time and, at the age of 27, decided he could do as well as the published writers. He was right. His first stories included "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet," and with them he was an immediate success. The impact of "Discord in Scarlet" was perhaps helped along by the otherwise irrelevant fact that at the time the advertising department of Astounding was playing with two-color printing on a few pages, as a ploy to lure in advertisers, and so some of the pictures for "Scarlet" were scarlet—we will see again how front-office decisions have had large effects on science fiction—but they would have been hits anyway. Van Vogt had enlarged the canvas for everyone with his alien protagonists. Other writers had invented aliens —Wells made them real in The War of the Worlds, Wein-baum made them personalities in A Martian Odyssey—but Van Vogt's aliens carried the whole story; we saw events through their eyes and discovered that to them Earthmen were aliens.

Then there was that former bulldozer artist, hotel clerk, and would-be trapeze artist (he gave it up after six years' training, figuring that if he hadn't caught on by then he must be in the wrong line of work), Theodore Sturgeon. He started slow with a smart-alecky little joke piece called "Ether Breather," but before long he found a line of country all his own, with stories like "Killdozer" and "Microcosmic God" and dozens more. Sturgeon once said that all of his stories were about a single subject and that subject was love. What most writers have to say about their own work is interesting only to psychologists, but there is truth to this statement; he did indeed bring into science fiction a sort of tenderness and compassion which was very much his own—but which, too, has become a part of the repertoire for a hundred writers since.

Then there were L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A. Heinlein. I link them together because in their early work "at least they were rather alike, and quite different from anybody else. Their heroes were not aliens or supermen. They were not even heroes. They were the kind of fellow who pumped your gas at any crossroads filling station. What was special about de Camp and Heinlein was the engineering exactitude with which they fleshed out their imaginings. Their cities were complete with toilets and tax collectors; they were not stage sets but habitats, and though they might be filled with thousand-year-hence machines, one felt they were real and could be built and made to work. Heinlein and de Camp taught the rest of us to imagine in detail, warts and all.

One could go on forever cataloguing writers from this time. It is hard to omit the likes of L. Ron Hubbard, that dominating, picaresque creature who learned how to make his fantasies come true with Dianetics and Scientology, or a dozen writers hardly remembered now, but new and innovative then, like Ross Rocklynne and Malcolm Jameson. But the most interesting thing about these writers is not only what they are in themselves, but the organizing fact about them all. What gave them a home in science fiction was a single editor, with a single magazine. The magazine was Astounding Stories (now rechristened Analog as part of the general process of dignifying what we do), and the editor was, right up until his death the other day, John W. Campbell.

That particular golden age is usually called the Golden Age of Campbell's Astounding, and it was all that. There were other writers, good ones. There were other magazines, with merits of their own. But Campbell was the one who picked up everything and put it down again in a different and better form. As one who has labored long in that same vineyard, I cannot conceal my admiration for his feat. In a period of no more than a few years he single-handedly wrote off a whole generation of science-fiction writers and bred a new one to his own new standards.

That statement is so true that it is partly true even where it is false. There were writers—Clifford D. Simak, Jack Williamson, Murray Leinster—who were ornaments to Campbell's Golden Age, and who had been ornaments to other magazines while Campbell was still an undergraduate at M.I.T. What he did with them was almost more remarkable. He made them new writers. From purveyors of space opera and gimmick adventure, Campbell retooled them into writers who competed on equal terms with the best of his new breed.

How did he do it? I'm not sure I know. Perhaps Campbell never knew himself; perhaps no one can tell how much was due to his own wit and wisdom, and how much to the power of an idea whose time has come. Certainly the '30s and '40s were years of technological ferment. The fission of the uranium atom was discovered in 1938, and Campbell recognized its importance and had his writers using it in stories in a matter of months. It was a time of marvels. It seemed that every day there was a faster plane, or a bigger ocean liner, or a taller building. It was a time for looking ahead, and one of Campbell's great innovations was the systematic process of describing possible futures that the think tanks have called morphological mapping.

Of course, after a while other people began to see what he had done. Some of his writers were won away from him by the blandishments of other editors. New writers came along, and new things happened in science fiction, to which John Campbell and Astounding contributed only a minor part. But those few years of growth and change are a landmark forever, and they are all John Campbell's.

It was a golden age for me, too, although I really had no role in those Campbell years of Abounding, I did manage to appear once or twice, in pseudonymous or collaborative stories of no great importance, and I even managed to be one of the competitors wooing his discoveries away from him when, at the age of 19, I became editor of two sf magazines of my own, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories.

But I came at science fiction in a different way. I was a writer and editor pretty early, but long before that I was a fan.

That was the other revolution that took place in science fiction around the beginning of our golden age: The development of fandom, as an auxiliary force and seedbed for science-fiction writers.

The beginnings of fandom are lost in antiquity; it may be as far back as 1930 when the first trufans appeared: here and there around the world, mostly in the big cities of the United States, addict met addict and started a club. They weren't big, and they didn't last, but around 1932 Wonder Stories tried to type its circulation by starting a big mail-order club called the Science Fiction League. It did nothing for Wonder Stories, but it was the making of fandom. While Wonder was slipping steadily down the drain, the SFL was signing up members, chartering local clubs, bringing fanpower into contact with itself. Chapter Number One was in Brooklyn, and by mid-1933 it was having monthly meetings at which 15 or 20 of us teenagers (plus an occasional old man of 20 or 25) solemnly debated whether A. Hyatt Verrill or John Taine was the best writer in science fiction and bragged about our collections. Live chapters sprang up in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia (the latter two are still in existence, though they've changed names and membership lists over the years). A few split off from the SFL, and new clubs were born.

Along about 1937 (remember that landmark date!) a group of us formed a club of our own called the Futurian Society of New York. The founders and general big men were Don Wollheim, Robert W. Lowndes (editor of various science-fiction and fantasy magazines over the years) and myself; the troops included people like my late collaborator C. M. Kornbluth, Richard Wilson, and Isaac Asimov; and a little later on, Damon Rnight, Judith Merril, Hannes Bok, and others joined up. We were all pretty young. Don Wollheim was probably our senior citizen, for he had been old enough to vote in 1936, and he was senior in an even more important respect: he had actually sold a story or two to Wonder Stories.

That proved it could be done, and so the rest of us started out to win our share of the gold and glory.

We worked hard. Probably we worked hard because it didn't really seem like work to write science-fiction stories. (In all truth, it hardly seems like work now. In my downest moments I find to say for our world at least that it has managed to pay me a lifelong living for doing things I would have been perfectly happy to do for nothing.) Not all of our work was aimed at the paying markets, for all of us had our own little fan magazines—mimeographed or hectographed, published in editions of a dozen or a hundred copies—for which we wrote invariably rotten amateur stories and sometimes quite good scathing attacks on everybody else. But our sights were aimed higher, and by and by most of us began to sell to the newsstand magazines. Not easily. Not often. But all the same, somehow, we began to break in. Asimov got the new editor of Amazing to buy a story called "Marooned Off Vesta," which for some reason he does not usually include in his book collections these days. Wollheim and John B. Michel together managed to get a story into Astounding. Bob Lowndes sold a poem to Unknown. In permutations and combinations beyond counting we collaborated: Wollheim with Michel, Kornbluth with myself, Lowndes with somebody, Dirk Wylie with Dick Wilson . . . sometimes three of us would join forces on a single story, sometimes even more. The all-time record may have been six Futurians collaborating on a single 2,500-word story, which sold somewhere for a fraction of a cent a word, bringing each of them a dollar and change for their efforts. After a while, in 1939, I somehow got it into my head that I could edit a science-fiction magazine.

I had no particular reason for believing this, but it didn't look particularly hard. So I went to see an editor named Robert O. Erisman, whom I had come to know in the course of having a dozen or two stories rejected by him, and explained to him that as it seemed too difficult to make a living out of writing stories I would be delighted to become his assistant, please. He was marvelously kind. He didn't throw me out of his office. He didn't give me a job, either, but he suggested that I go to see another editor who was in charge of a large chain of pulps that did not include an sf magazine and see if I could talk him into giving me a shot at it. And so I went to see Rogers Terrill at Popular Publications, and Rog surprised all of us by giving me a desk and a budget and a printing schedule and orders to create a couple of sf magazines.

The budget was tiny, to be sure. My salary was even tinier. But there I was, buying stories and hiring artists and having a hell of a time. It was so much fun that the rest of the Futurian Society wanted to play that game too, and so Bob Lowndes persuaded a publisher named Louis Silberkleit to put him in charge of a magazine called Future, and Don Wolheim convinced a father-and-son team named Albert that what they needed was an sf magazine called Cosmic Stories with him as editor (they went along, but only up to a point: the sticking point was that they refused to pay for the stories, so Don had the problem of getting his writers to donate their stories). And all of a sudden, we Futurians were no longer on the outside looking in, we were the inside. We were being allowed to act out our fantasies in the real world. The inmates had taken charge of the institution.

Camelot never lasts; a war came along and blew us all away. Some of us went into the service. Others stayed out, but the magazines died in the wartime paper shortages. And that interlude passed into history.

But a few years later, a little older and hopefully a shade wiser, we were all back for more.

The war ended in 1945. Three or four years later the publishing industry had got back to its normal state of rosy optimism shaded by bankruptcies, and science fiction began to move again. Honorable hardcover houses (Random House was the biggest) brought out sf collections from the magazines; four or five fans around the country took their savings out of the bank and set up as semi-pro book publishers specializing in sf and fantasy, and there was talk of new magazines.

In the years just around 1950 occurred another of those editorial revolutions like John Campbell's; the difference was that this new golden age appeared on two fronts at once.

We mentioned earlier that business-office decisions have had major effects on the history of science fiction. Two of the quirkier ones occurred here. The publishers of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine decided that for corporate strength it ought to add a couple of titles. And an Italian publisher of gamy comics was making so much money that he decided to break into the American publishing world.

What the Ellery Queen people did was talk to their contributor Anthony Boucher, then mostly known as a mystery writer with a few sf stories and fantasies to his credit. Tony proposed what they called The Magazine of Fantasy (the title later broadened to include and Science Fiction, or F&SF for short). They thought it worth trying out. Tentatively. They brought it out as a one-shot, and were pleased enough with the sales to try it again as a quarterly, as a bi-monthly, and ultimately as a monthly.

What the Italian publisher did was to open a New York office and then go looking for magazines to publish. I will not list the magazines because it is too painful; but somehow someone put "science fiction" on the list, and their editor, Vera Cerutti, was appointed to make it happen. Vera didn't know that much about sf, but she knew that she didn't, and more than that she knew somehow who did. His name was Horace Gold.

The Golden Age of Gold sounds like either a misfired attempted joke or a Shostakovich ballet, but it was very real. Around 1950, Horace Gold was a prematurely bald man in his mid-30s, somewhat the worse for a World War II disability but well able to cope with the world. Where the coping was difficult it was the world that had to change, not Horace. He had written God's own quantity of material of all kinds, and among the comic scenarios and the radio scripts and the true detectives there were a few sf stories—not bad, but not great—and a couple of outstanding fantasies: "Trouble with Water," and above all a fine, tingly novel called None but Lucifer (which, for reasons which cannot possibly be any good, has never appeared in book form, to everyone's loss).

All this was commendable, but was there anything in that record which qualified Horace Gold to make sf over in a new and better form? If so, it is hard to identify the diagnostic symptom; yet that's what he did. He wasn't scientifically trained. His own writing was best where it had least to do with science fiction. But he had two traits that served him well. For one, he had a mind that retained everything; for another, he had persistence that moved mountains. Horace Gold's chosen weapon was the telephone. There are few writers active in sf in the decade of the '50s who do not remember the phone ringing at any hour, at all hours, and Horace's voice picking up a month-old conversation about writing a story or revising one without missing a beat.

His new magazine was called Galaxy. It began with a burst of bombastic promises about a new kind of science fiction. The funny thing was that it made them good. In its first years it published any number of wise and witty and wonderful stories—by Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Robert A. Heinlein (wooed away from Astounding), Clifford D. Simak (coaxed out of semi-retirement), and countless others. Very few of those writers set out to write for 8

Galaxy. Even fewer intended to write the stories they ultimately published. Mountie-like, Horace Gold tracked them down wherever they hid and made them stand and deliver. I mean no denigration of him when I say that he himself suggested relatively few stories to his writers. (There are exceptions, including one of the most successful of my own.) But Horace's talent was not tutorial. It was obstetrical. When he came at you with those forceps, the story got born. Nearly every one of those early stories has appeared in the best sf anthologies, some of them a dozen times and more; a publisher offered a not-so-small fortune, not long ago, for the privilege of reprinting all those issues verbatim; and that's what Horace Gold did, all by himself.

And uptown at the offices of The Magazine of Fantasy, Tony Boucher and his sidekick, J. Francis McComas, were doing something rather similar with a quite different list of writers. Their notion was that it was possible to merge the two previously disparate streams of science fiction: the literary-humanist tradition (the novels of Wells, Olaf Staple-don, S. Fowler Wright, and others) and the gimmicky, highflying, innovative, adventurous sf of the pulps. They made it happen. They broadened the universe of discourse for sf writers to include everything there is. Nothing was off limits. No concept could not be explored.

If this seems like a small tiling, consider what the world was like in those days of the early '50s. It was the Joe McCarthy era in the United States. Dissent was penalized. Careers were being blasted. In those years, when senators and Presidents headed for the storm cellar, when journalists and statesmen guarded their tongues, science fiction was the home of free speech—almost the only public forum there was, for some people, in some ways. One still meets graying ministers and scientists who remember those 1950s issues of Galaxy and F6-SF with eternal gratitude, for letting them think about the unthinkable when it was costly to speak out loud.

But that Camelot ended, too, with a whimper. All golden ages come to an end. Pericles met the Peloponnesian War; the Caesars lost out to Alaric and the barbarians. What defeated that golden age of science fiction was a stock manipulation.

It was one of those front-office things we have seen before, but on a heroic and catastrophic scale. Magazine publishers do not deliver their publications to your local newsstand themselves. They employ intricate chains of distributors and wholesalers to do the job. Until the mid-1950s there were two major channels for national distribution: the collective resources of a dozen independents and their wholesalers on the one hand, and on the other the massive, ancient American News Company with its countless subsidiaries.

In the mid-1950s a stock investor looked upon the American News balance sheet and found it good. Over the decades it had acquired vast equities in restaurants and warehouses and real estate, and all of those assets had been bought when the world was young and prices were low. You could buy up the stock, he mused, and sell off all the assets, and close up the company, and come out with a ruddy fortune. And so he did. ANC was liquidated, and dealt the magazine business in general a blow from which it has never recovered —as anyone can see who has tried to buy a copy of Look or Collier's lately.

So science-fiction magazines were done in, most of them. There were 37 titles at the peak of the boom in the 1950s; at last count, there were perhaps half a dozen struggling to stay alive. There's still plenty of science fiction—in books. But the magazines are only a shadow . ..

It could be different. A new publisher to take a chance. Another Campbell, or a latter-day Gold. Some bright new ideas, and some bright new writers to make them real ... But that's another story, and a different Golden Age!