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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 108 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.

In my second term, my home room was in Annex 1, identified as Brooklyn PS 1 at the time it was built, probably around the time of the Civil War. (Or the Punic.) It was by all odds the dingiest structure I have ever spent much time in. The toilets were plugged and foul. Leaking pipes overhead left white nacre on the walls. The heating system was a mockery, and the time was February of 1933, cold as hell. Fortunately, only a few of my classes were in Annex 1. In midmorning I shifted to Annex 5, a much newer, nicer school next to a playground, six or seven face-frozen blocks away. Then in the afternoon I had classes in the Main Building, the whilom factory, just on the other side of the constant truck rumble of Flatbush Avenue. After the first few days I noticed that I was dodging the trucks in the company of the same tall, skinny guy with glasses—he looked quite a lot like me, or actually quite a lot handsomer than me—and he turned out to be a science-fiction fan. His name was Joseph Harold Dockweiler, but he wasn't terribly pleased with it, and a few years later he changed it to Dirk Wylie.

Dirk was the sort of best friend every young person should have. Our interests were similar, but not identical. We were much of the same age, and almost identically of the same stage of growth, so that we discovered the same things about the world at the same time: girls, smoking, drinking, reading, science fiction. If you mapped a schematic diagram of Dirk onto one of me, nearly all the points at the centers of our personalities would match exactly. Off to one side was my growing interest in politics and society, which Dirk found unexciting; off to another, his in weapons and cars, which I shared at most tepidly.

Dirk lived in Queens Village, an hour from Tech by subway and bus. Like me, he was an only child. Like me, he had no close ties with the kids next door. Like me, he had a tolerant home environment, willing to let him grow on his own. Like me, he had a Collection.

The possession of a Collection is one of the diagnostic signs of Fandom. Another is Trying to Write, and Dirk shared that symptom with me, too. We found out these things about each other within the first week after our meeting, after which there was no question that, at least until further notice, we two loners were going to be Best Friends. So we were. We stayed Best Friends. When we were old enough, we even married two girls who themselves were Best Friends, and were Best Men at each other's weddings.

Although we were schoolmates, school was the least part of both our lives. There was much more education in the outside world. Partly it was because of Brooklyn Tech itself, splendid school but not for us. It was necessary to declare a specialty at the end of the first year, so that at the age of thirteen I committed myself to a lifelong career as a chemical engineer, which was nonsense. (I uncommitted myself a few years later by dropping out of high school without graduating.) Not all of it was unpleasant. There was a lot of how-to-do-it in the curriculum, and we found ourselves operating machine tools and casting molten iron into greensand cope-and-drag molds, and that was fun. Lab work in chemistry and physics was enjoyable, and the math courses were challenging, but the rest was a washout. Both Dirk and I were readers, and so it our custom to read our textbooks all the way through in the first week of any term, and so the rest of the term was unendurable tedium. But the excitement of the world outside never waned.

 

I count it one of the great good fortunes of my life that I grew up with all the resources of one of the world's greatest cities within my reach. Young kids of the 70s, I do devoutly pity you, stuck in your pasteurized suburban developments except when Mom chauffeurs you into town. I had the city streets, always exciting in themselves, and I had the subways.

Of all the modes of mechanized urban transport man has devised, the subway is the most nearly perfect. I love them all, from the creaky tiny cars of Budapest to the shiny streamliners of Toronto, under ground and above. Moscow's is beautiful. London's is marvelously efficient. Paris's runs engagingly from the super-technological to the quaint. But first loves are best, and New York's subways are what I grew up on. In the days of my youth the five-cent fare was sacred, and so for a nickel you could be carried from the Bronx to Coney Island, from sylvan Flushing to Wall Street. If you were a young boy and willing to take minor risks (jail, electrocution, things like that), you didn't even need the nickel. I was six years old when I learned that you could ride free from the Avenue H station of the BMT just by climbing over the exit doors. If I chose to visit friends in Sheepshead Bay, I could ride there free, and ride back at the same economical rate just by climbing an embankment, stepping carefully over the third rail, and entering the platform of the station there. When we moved to Kings Highway there was another embankment, equally easily breached. The Seventh Avenue subway station, near Grand Army Plaza, could be penetrated by winding oneself through the exit stiles. They kept adults out, but there was enough give in them to let a hundred-pound kid slip through. Of the major lines, the BMT's defenses were the leakiest; the IRT was built on a less carefree plan, but you could take the BMT to Queens, where the two lines ran together, and thus enter the forbidden pathways of the IRT at only the small cost of an extra hour or so of travel time.

If you chose to go somewhere past the ends of the subway lines, there was a further natural resource of free transportation in the form of trucks and trolley cars. They weren't as much fun. You were exposed to the weather, and there was always the chance of falling off. Or of being caught; while once you were into the subway system, you were as serene as any paying fare. But the whole city was open to exploration, and I explored it systematically from the age of six on.

I didn't always steal rides. There were times when I walked because it was my whim to walk that time, as any lordly millionaire might wave his limousine away for a nice day's stroll. Walking is the best way to know a city, which is why I feel quite at home in, say, London, and even now am a stranger in Los Angeles. And for most of my high-school career, my companion in exploration was usually Dirk Wylie.

Sometimes we explored geography, sometimes other things. Not a part of his Collection, but hidden behind the Amazings and the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels he had publications of another sort. They had titles like Spicy Western Stories and Paris Nights, soft-core porn that I had never seen and that inflamed my pubescent glands a lot. In return I conducted him to his first burlesque show, doing the same for his.

It wasn't my first burlesque show. Not by, even then, a number of years. When I was a little kid, five or so, my parents had taken me with them to the Oxford Burlesque, near where Atlantic and Flatbush avenues met in Brooklyn. I liked the baggy-pants comedians, didn't understand what the stripping was all about, but was thrilled to be included in something Grown-up. I kept in touch with the Oxford, one way or another, all through my childhood. When my parents stopped taking me, as soon as I was old enough to pass the ticket taker's scrutiny, I went by myself; and in the famine period between I would still skate down to the nearby Loft's soda fountain, and often enough I'd see the chorus girls, makeup an inch and a quarter deep around their eyes, sipping sodas through a straw and gazing at themselves in the mirrored walls.

In our sophomore year at Brooklyn Tech, the New Building at last was completed and we moved in. How modern and grand it seemed! Five or six stories tall, with an athletic field on the roof, shiny, clean laboratories instead of the jagged zinc of the old factory, an auditorium with air conditioning and the fullest projection facilities; the thing even had a radio station of its own. Pretty Fort Greene Park was just across the street, and the concentrated heart of Brooklyn's downtown only a five-minute walk away. The magnetism was too powerful to resist; Dirk and I walked there every afternoon, to go to a burlesque theater, or a movie, or just to explore.

Let me tell you about Brooklyn. For the first part of Brooklyn's life it was not a conquered province of New York City, it was a competitor. Even after the consolidation it still competed. Brooklyn had its own baseball team (the Dodgers), its own library system (better than New York's in every respect, except for, maybe, the Fifth Avenue reference facility), its own parks (after Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park in Manhattan, he took what he had learned to Brooklyn and laid out the even more spectacular Prospect Park), its own museums, its own zoo. Downtown Brooklyn had its own department stores—Namm's, Loeser's, A & S—and I still think they were nicer than, and almost as big as, Macy's or Gimbels'. Downtown Brooklyn had four or five first-run movie houses, including the Brooklyn Paramount, as lavish a marble-staired temple as any in the world, at least until the Radio City Music Hall came along. On Fulton Street it even had legitimate theaters, with the same sort of bills as theaters in Boston or Chicago. Road companies of Broadway shows played there after the New York runs had closed, and sometimes Broadway shows opened there for tryouts before risking the metropolis across the river.* And all these marvels, stores and shows, bookshops and burlesques, parks and playgrounds, were within our grasp. If Brooklyn palled, New York was just across the bridge; often enough we walked across the East River and up Broadway as far as Union Square to check out the second-hand book and magazine stores on Fourth Avenue. School could not compete. Outside it we were learning the world.

 

* I saw a preview of George White's Scandals of 1934 there weeks before it hit Broadway. I was no big White fan, but that one had been advertised as having a sort of science-fiction theme, something about how the Earth looked to Martians. The science-fiction part was contemptibly unimaginative, of course, but I rather liked the songs, and may be the only living person in America who still knows the words to "The Fellow Who Loves You." It was lucky I saw it in Brooklyn, because when the show hit Broadway it folded at once.

 

Which was changing.

The Depression had settled in, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated a week or two after Dirk and I met, and there was talk of a New Deal. Society seemed to be evolving into something new before our eyes. So was science. We heard about things like relativity and the expanding universe—not just in the sf magazines, but even on the radio. The world seemed to be into science fiction almost as much as Dirk and I were, at least in a nuts-and-bolts way. Airplanes were almost common in the sky, whereas a few years earlier it had been reason enough for housewives to leave the dishes in the sink and run outside to gawk at a plane. There were dirigibles, and the new Empire State Building, almost a quarter mile of masonry stretching up to scrape the sky, was topped with a mooring mast for blimps (or for King Kong to cling to). There was a kid in our classes at Brooklyn Tech who actually flew—yes, had a real pilot's license, spun the prop, took off, landed, was full of stories about how you could walk into an unseen spinning propeller and be chopped into ground round before you knew it, about hairy landings in the fog and storms aloft. I had fantasies about getting a plane of my own, preferably one of the swallow-tailed or heart-shaped or magnetically driven jobs out of Wonder Stories, challenging my friend to a race and beating his ass off. I knew that that was fantasy. But what but fantasy was it that he was doing, every Saturday at Floyd Bennett Field?

In a way that had never happened before in the history of the human race, the world was looking into the future. Most especially Dirk and I. Most particularly through science fiction. When the Science Fiction League came along, we both sent our applications off at once, and almost by return mail I got a postcard from a man who identified himself as one George Gordon Clark. He was, he announced, Member 1 of the Science Fiction League. Not only that, he had been authorized to form Chapter 1; and I was invited to attend Meeting 1.

It was at night, and most of an hour away by subway, but I would not have missed it for rubies.

 

When G. G. Clark started the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, I do not think he knew what he was getting into.

Clark was a grown-up adult human being, in his late twenties or thereabouts. He had a job, and he had a Collection that made even Dirk's look sick.* Clark not only had every copy of every science-fiction magazine ever published, but they had that fresh-from-the-mint look of having been bought new from the corner candy store, rather than being picked up second-hand. He even had a few variorum editions, such as a copy of Amazing Stories on which one plate of the three-color cover had failed to print, so that it was all ghostly blues and greens. He also had more sf books than I had ever seen in one place before, and he even had science-fiction fan magazines, of which I had never previously even heard.

 

* Mine was sick to begin with. I had a fair number of books and magazines, but no place to put them, except for what space I could make by pushing the dishes and cans of soup off some kitchen shelves. That strikes me as odd. There were not many books in my house when I was a kid, except my own. My father read nothing but Westerns, which he kept on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. My mother did not seem to read much at all, which is strange: she was a pretty literate person, could recite poetry at great length, had been valedictorian of her graduating class, even once held a minor editorial job with St. Nicholas Magazine for a brief time. (A happy one for me; she used to bring home the review copies of children's books.) But was fifteen before 1 lived in a house with a real bookcase.

 

I think Clark must have been less than delighted with us scruffy adolescents who turned up in response to his postcard. Not one of us was within ten years of his age. At least one—Arthur Selikowitz, a tall, skinny polymath who entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute not long after at the age of thirteen—could not then have been quite eleven. At our first meeting the first thing we did was to elect Clark chairman. There was no alternative. Not only did he rank us all (Member 1), but it was his hall. We met some of the time in his cellar library (allowed to touch The Collection only one at a time, and with Clark hovering vigilantly by), sometimes in a rented classroom of a nearby public school. The term "nearby," of course, refers to its proximity to Clark. All the rest of us had to travel miles.

It is hard for me to remember what we did at these meetings, and I think the probable reason for that is that we did very little. There was a certain amount of reading the minutes and passing amendments to the bylaws, and not much else. After a while we decided to publish a mimeographed fan magazine of our own. I became its editor (largely, I think, because I owned my own typewriter), and it may have been the first place in which words of mine were actually published.

I haven't seen a copy of The Brooklyn Reporter in many years and doubt that there was much in it worth reading, but it was marvelously exciting to me then. My words were going out to readers all over the country! (Not very many readers, no. But quite geographically dispersed.) People I never saw were writing letters to comment on what I had done. It was through The Brooklyn Reporter that I first met Robert Lowndes—only as a pen pal at first, because he lived in faraway Connecticut and neither of us could see any way of bridging that near-hundred-mile distance. But we became good friends by correspondence, quickly found interests in common (we both were addicted to popular songs), and shared others: he initiated me into Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and J. K. Huysmans, and I introduced him to James Branch Cabell.

You see, what we science-fiction fans mostly wanted to do with each other's company was to talk—about science fiction, and about the world. Robert's Rules of Order didn't seem to provide for much of that, so we formed the habit of The Meeting After the Meeting. After enduring an hour or so of parliamentary rules, we troops would bid farewell to our leader and walk in a body to the nearest station of the EL On the way we would stop off at a soda fountain. This had three very good features: it gave us an informal atmosphere for talk, it supplied us with ice-cream sodas, and it got rid of G. G. Clark, so that we kids could be ourselves. The only bad part of it was that we had to adjourn the regular meetings pretty early, since none of us were old enough to stay out very late. But, considering what was happening at the regular meetings, that was no sacrifice.

I really don't know why the meetings had to be so dull. I wonder why it never occurred to any of us to invite some real-live science-fiction writer to come and bask in our worship. That would have been a thrill past orgasm for every one of us, maybe even for Clark. It wouldn't have mattered who the author was, and I'm sure some would have come. For one thing, if anyone had ever suggested it to Hugo Gernsback, he would surely have flogged any number of them into our arms to boost sales.

I know why it didn't occur to me. I was simply too naive. I wasn't aware that writers lived in places where they could be met. I don't know where I thought they did live. I may have thought they were mostly dead—that seemed to be the case with Mark Twain and Voltaire and a lot of my other favorites. If they were alive, I suppose I assumed they occupied some tree-lined, gardened, pillared suburb of something like heaven. But still, why didn't the idea occur to someone more sophisticated than I?

 

Well, in a way it did. After a while two Real Pro Writers did in fact come to our meetings.

They weren't top pros; in fact, I had never heard of either of them until they showed up. And they weren't there to help promote Wonder Stories, either . . . oh, my, no. Their names were John B. Michel and Donald A. Wollheim.

To fourteen-year-old me they were immensely impressive high-powered types. Not physically. Neither were most of the rest of us fans; to some extent, Damon Knight's toad theory is descriptive enough. I started out lucky enough, but somewhere just before I got into science fiction I went swimming one day at the St. George Pool, huge indoor saltwater marvel, and went off the high board, meaning to see how close I could come to the tiled bottom. I came real close. When I got out of the water and looked in the bronze wall mirrors, I found I had knocked off a front tooth; and so, for the next couple of decades until a dentist shamed me into doing something about it, when I smiled I smiled gold.* So did Bob Lowndes. Clark was sort of belligerently defensive-looking most of the time. Cyril Kornbluth, when he came along, was short and pudgy, Jack Gillespie looked like an Irish jockey, Walter Kubilius was incredibly tall and wraithy, six-feet-eight or thereabouts, and maybe all of a hundred pounds. All of us came to understand early on that it was not on our looks that we would make our way in the world.

 

* I also had pimples, not many, but prominently located, usually on the end of my nose and big enough to be visible as soon as I was. Donald used to call that one my "auxiliary nose," bless his darling heart.

 

Both Wollheim and Michel had really bad complexions, and Donald had mannerisms that I suppose had origins within his own head, but gave the appearance of skeptical contempt for everything around him. Donald always carried a rolled-up umbrella. He rarely looked directly at the person he was talking to, but stared forty-five degrees to starboard, wry half-smile on his face, in moments of concentration a finger at his nose. Johnny was a self-taught cynic, and talked that way. Donald's voice was gruff and abrupt. They were both smart as hell. Not only that. They were far more mature than the rest of us, including Clark; Johnny was a year or two older than I, and Donald a year or two older than that. (He had to be all of nineteen.) But the real clincher, the thing that elevated both of them to at least veneration, if not actual sanctity, was that they both had actually been paid for work published in a professional science-fiction magazine. Johnny had earned his letter by winning some sort of contest, in which he supplied a plot that some other writer—I think it was Clifford D. Simak—wrote a story around. Donald had done even better than that. A story entirely of his own creation, "The Man from Ariel," had been published.

And, it turned out, that was why they were with us. They were mad. Hugo Gernsback wasn't paying his writers. Johnny had finally collected his five dollars, but not without endless annoyance, and Donald had not been paid in full even then. They had come to the Brooklyn Science Fiction League to tell us their stories, and to seek vengeance.

All this inside information was revelatory to me. It was more exciting than anything that had happened to me before, at least since I discovered science fiction, maybe since I discovered sex. I don't know what airy-fairy assumptions I had made about the mechanisms by which real authors supported themselves through their work. I suppose, if I thought at all, I guessed that once your work appeared in print, the government, or somebody, handed you a blank checkbook, which you filled out as you needed, or chose to want, their money.

Now that I have had forty-some years of dealing with publishers on my own, and some of them even more reluctant than Hugo to cough up the scratch, I can see the picture in full holographic 3-D. Gernsback was not alone. Other publishers have been known to stiff their authors. It is a matter of how much money is coming in, call it X, and how much is going out: Y. When X Y, all is serene. But when X < Y, then you have the problem of eleven holes in the dike and only ten fingers to plug them with. When you can't pay all the bills, which bills do you pay? You placate the people who can hurt you the most. You pay your own salary, or at least enough to keep you going. You pay the printers, because if you don't they won't print your next issue, and then you're out of business. You pay your paper supplier, because if you don't he won't give the printer any paper to print your next issue on. Out of what's left you pay at least enough of your taxes, rent, and utilities to keep things from being turned off. And then you start to think about the writers.

All this is, of course, immoral. Without the writers none of the other things matter in the least. But it is the way it is, and one reason for it is that writers do not write only for money. They write to be published. All writers like to be paid for what they write, but few would stop writing just because the money was sparse or hard to collect. And those few are easily and instantly replaced out of the immense pool of millions, literally millions, of would-be writers who would sell their sisters to Buenos Aires for the chance to have one story published anywhere, paid for or not.

Of course, the stories written by the pros are probably likely to sell more copies for you than the cleaned-up salvage from the slush pile. But maybe you can't afford to be choosy. If given the choice between publishing a magazine with so-so stories (but stories you can get) and a magazine made up of blank pages because the really good writers won't give you any more credit, which would you do? You would probably hold your nose and publish. If you didn't, your place, too, might well be taken by some would-be publisher ready to fill the vacuum.

Not all publishers think that way—in fact, let me put on the record right now that the business ethics in publishing seems to me a lot more praiseworthy than in most industries. But some do, even in the best of times. And in the Depression that was the Law of Nature, red in tooth and fang. Clayton's Astounding had paid its writers punctually and well. Clayton's Astounding also had gone bust in 1933. Amazing and Wonder were a whole lot less benevolent, but they were still alive.

It's interesting to try to calculate just how much money Gernsback traded the good will of his writers for. It probably was not very much—in the thousands, but probably not in the tens of thousands. But then there wasn't all that much money around in the science-fiction field at that time. In the mid-30s there were only three science-fiction magazines, often bimonthly. I estimate that the total amount paid to writers by all three of them in an average year was not much over fifteen thousand dollars. Allowing for pseudonyms, there may have been as many as fifty individuals selling stories to one or another of them in that period, and what they had to divide among themselves in return for feeding all us famished fans the fiction we lived on was something like six dollars per week per writer.

 

I could have made that calculation at the time, if I had wanted to. I didn't want to. I didn't care.

Listening to the wisdom that flowed from Johnny Michel and Don Wollheim was like standing on the mountain, staff in hand, while the Voice spoke from the burning bush. I could not believe I was so lucky, and I wanted to be part of it.

I came back from the meetings and reported all this Gospel to Dirk, who cursed his parents for settling in Queens Village, so far from Bay Ridge and the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, and worked out stratagems for making the next meetings with me. We came. We sat at the feet of the masters, in one soda fountain or another, while the ice cream melted in our sodas and our malteds went flat, and we resolved to be just like them.

And when it turned out that Johnny and Donald were inviting us to join a crusade to set these iniquities aright, we took it as not debatable that we should sign up at once. What Donald proposed was that all we SFL members should secede, start our own clubs, assert our independence of The Evil One, and let the world know him for what he was. It sounded great. We thrilled to the idea of causing so much commotion and trouble for Gernsback that he would perforce reform. Or kill himself. Or be driven from the society of human beings; choice of any or all of the above; and so we entered into the great world of science-fiction feuds.

 

 

 

 

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Framed