3
Science-fiction Samizdat
The fanzines are the underground press of science fiction. They come in all shapes and sizes, the contents as varied as the format. Some is very good. The best article I have ever read on hand-to-hand combat in space was written by Harry Harrison and published in the fanzine Amra. All that I know about mescaline comes from a fanzine article by Bill Donaho. Damon Knight made his original reputation as a science-fiction critic by a surgical dissection of the quivering flesh of A. E. van Vogt, in a fanzine article when van Vogt was at the height of his popularity.
Some of it, on the other hand, is not very good at all, because there are no standards of excellence that fanzines must meet. Not any. All it takes to publish a fanzine is the will to make it happen, and maybe access to somebody else's mimeograph machine, and in a pinch you can get by without the latter. (There have been carbon-copied fanzines, limited to as many sheets of paper as you can roll into a typewriter.) Consequently there is a lot that is not very interesting to read even by the standards of the fellow who wrote it ( Gosh, friends, this is lousy, isn't it?"), and even a hostile reception does not necessarily keep a fanzine from continuing ("Wow, gang, you really slammed the lastish, but wotthehell, we'll keep plugging").
Reflecting the fact that everything is always getting bigger, there are some pretty spectacular fanzines these days, professionally printed, illustrated handsomely, even one or two, like Andy Porter's Algol, which, my God!, actually pay their contributors. Charlie Brown's news-fanzine, Locus, sells a couple thousand copies an issue. (We were lucky to get rid of twenty-five, most of them free.) But the lower end of the spectrum stays pretty much the same, and that's where most of the action is. No matter how deficient in redeeming social virtues a fanzine may seem to you and me, it always has one: it is educating the person who puts it out. Ray Bradbury got his start in fanzines. So did a couple dozen of the best other science-fiction writers around.
When I got my hands on the levers of power in The Brooklyn Reporter, I didn't think of it as a training program. I thought of it as fun, scary fun in a way, because I perceived that I could make a fool out of myself in a more public fashion than I had ever been able to do before. But pleasure apart from that.
What we printed was a mix of what interested us, and although we did not consciously think out the probability that that would also be what interested those other people just like us who would hopefully be our readers, still that's a good way of being an editor. We printed news of what was going on in our club ("Eight members present at the last meeting, and Joseph Harry Dockweiler joined"), reviews of the professional science-fiction magazines ("The newest Van Manderpootz story is about a professor who has spectacles that can see into the future. It's a hack idea, but Weinbaum's comic treatment saves it"), gossip about the pros ("Doc Smith has just completed the mathematical calculations for his next Skylark novel, which runs to one hundred thousand words, or longer than the serial will be"), and letters. Oh, yes, letters, lots of letters, and probably they were the most interesting things in many of the magazines. Some fanzines, like the long-lasting West Coast Voice of the Imagi-Nation, printed nothing else.
We also published amateur stories and poems. Usually they had been rejected by all the pros, for good reason. Sometimes they were a kind of writing for which professional markets did not seem to exist. My favorite of the fanzines I edited was a tiny quarter-size mimeographed job named Mind of Man, and what it was mostly about was playing with words. MoM was tiny, infrequent, and died at an early age, but I loved it. The contents owed something to Lewis Carroll and quite a lot to James Joyce (whose "work in progress," later called Finnegans Wake, was running in batches in a strange little magazine called transition). There was also a little science fiction in Mind of Man now and then, but you had to look pretty close to find it; then, as now, there was no rule that the contents of an sf fanzine had to have anything to do with sf. I wrote nearly everything published in it, including a lot of, ah, poetry? Call it that—
Necroptic life, in Thursday bliss,
Exploits the winnowed worker's brawn,
While taurine canines gently kiss
With urine the aurescid lawn.
I would guess that the total circulation of Mind of Man ran well into two figures, and that counts the pass-arounds; but there were those who liked it. Even years later, once or twice people have quoted poems from it from memory, and I was immensely flattered. And other fanzine editors would ask me to do "something like that" for them.
That's one of the sinful temptations editors put in the way of writers: "Say, Joe, I loved Catch-22; why don't you write something like that for me?" It's a bad thing for writers, but fortunately I was immune to that temptation at that time. I didn't know how to write "something like that" again. I wasn't really sure how I had come to write "that" in the first place.
While we were staining our fingers with mimeograph ink, our eyes were still firmly fixed on the professional magazines. They looked like Heaven.
To their editors and writers, I am sure they looked a lot less than heavenly; the Depression was still with us, sparing nor man nor magazine. But figurez-vous, even at half a cent a word, a five thousand-word story would fetch twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars happened to be what my mother earned every week and supported both of us on. But, of course, the money was not the point.
So I wrote my stories, and I sent them out. I didn't actually finish very many of them; I was given to beginning stories, reading what I had written, deciding it was awful, and throwing it away. In that judgment I was no doubt right, but if I had known then what I know now, I would have forced myself to finish them, anyway, for the practice and the discipline. Of the hundreds upon hundreds of sheets of paper I covered with typing in the mid-1950s, only a few dozen wound up as "finished" stories, mostly very short, and with them I assaulted the professional editors.
The conventional and best way to submit stories is to mail them in. That cost money, maybe a dime each way for each submission. I quickly realized that for half that much I could take the subway to the editors' offices and hand the stories over myself, at the negligible expense of a few hours of my own time.
Moving in the company of Real Pros like Don Wollheim had given me some sophistication. To appear in any professional science-fiction magazine would be total ecstasy, but some magazines offered more ecstasy than others, or at least more money, and so I started at the top.
Astounding had gone down the tube as a member of the Clayton pulp chain, but Street & Smith had bought into the wreckage, and it was back in business. Its editor was a man named F. Orlin Tremaine, and it was housed in a dilapidated old slum on Seventh Avenue, a block below Barney's clothing store. I have no idea when the building was new, probably sometime in the Middle Jurassic. The lower floors were filled with printing presses, shaking the whole structure as they rolled. The building had a hydraulic elevator. To make it go up or down, the operator had to tug on a rope outside the car itself. The building had long since been declared a hazard by the fire marshal, and so smoking was prohibited everywhere in it. (That didn't actually stop anybody, it only inconvenienced them a little. When John Campbell became editor a little later on, he kept a copper ashtray on his desk, copper because of its high thermal conductivity, and whisked it into a drawer when the early-warning system announced the presence of a fire warden.) To get from the reception room to any editor's office involved going up and down staircases, squeezing past rolls of paper stored to feed the ground-floor presses, reveling in the fascinating smells of printer's ink and rotting wood.
I didn't get past the reception room the first couple of times. I was met at the desk by a diffident young male assistant to Tremaine; he took the manuscript from my grubby young hands, flipped through it, and announced that I didn't have my name and address typed in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. It was on the last page, I told him. Well enough, he said, but it's supposed to be on the first one. He also pointed out that standard typing paper was 8½ x 11 inches and plain white, while what I was using was several inches longer than that and had narrow blue lines down the left-hand margin. Sorry about that, I said. (I didn't tell him the reason. My mother worked in a law office at that time, and legal cap was what she filched to bring home to me.) But he allowed me to leave the story with him, and a week or two later I got a penny postcard from Street & Smith, announcing that it was "ready for pickup." The card was a printed form, from which I deduced that I was not the only writer who had more time than postage stamps.
I came to see a great many of those cards over the years. Tremaine never bought a word from me, or even came very close. But he was nice about it. After the first couple of submissions he began inviting me down to his office to chat, and toward the end of his tenure even took me out to lunch now and then.
I cannot tell you how much this inflated me, not only in my own ego but in the estimation of my fellow fans. Heaven knows what he got out of it. Since I was editing several fanzines at the time, it is possible that he mistook me for some kind of power figure among the readers, but I don't really think so. I think Tremaine was just a good guy.
He was also a good editor. John Campbell is the worshipped god in the pantheon of Astounding, but Tremaine did some smart things. It was not his fault that he knew nothing at all about science fiction when he took it on; Street & Smith bought it and handed it to him as a chore, and that was that. He did his best to learn, and he succeeded. He published some incredible rot. He even wrote some of the sappiest of it, or at least so gossip says: "Warner Van Lorne," one of the most frequent bylines in his magazine, was supposed to be Tremaine himself. But he did some very smart things. (Including hiring John Campbell to succeed him when he was moved upstairs.) I liked him, respected him, missed him when he left, and wondered if this young punk Campbell would ever measure up to Tremaine's standards.
Tremaine was no scientist, and so Astounding during his tenure was likely to come up with some galumphing horrors, but the virtue of that defect was that he was able to publish some pretty fascinating stuff that any scientifically trained person would never touch. Not just stories. Astounding ran nearly the complete works of Charles Fort, in interminable serial form, compendia of curious and inexplicable happenings: minnows falling from a clear sky, strange lights of airships seen before airships were invented. The towering flights of fantasy in the Tremaine Astounding were an attractive change from the nuts-and-bolts gadgetry of Gernsback's Wonder or the stilted stodge of T. O'Conor Sloane's Amazing.
Nevertheless, as Astounding didn't seem to want to buy what I had to sell, I took my wares to the others, too. Wonder Stories was a grubby kind of magazine, full of self-glorifying little digs at the competition, such as long lists of titles of stories published in other magazines under the heading "Stories We Reject Appear Elsewhere." (Don Wollheim said it should have read "Stories We Don't Pay For Appear Elsewhere.") Yet it had two things going for it. One was that the major find of the mid-30s, a new writer named Stanley G. Weinbaum, turned up there long before he was seen in any other magazines. Weinbaum was great; his first story, "A Martian Odyssey," still appears on most lists of all-time best science fiction. Well it should. Weinbaum invented in it a character of a sort no one had thought to create before, an ostrich-shaped alien creature named Tweel who didn't think, talk, act, or look like a human, but was nevertheless a person. All other writers in the field, once the egg had been demonstrated to stand on its end, immediately began to invent personalized alien creatures of their own, and have continued to do so ever since. The other thing that made Wonder attractive was that they had mighty nice rejection slips. From Astounding I never even saw a slip, just the penny postcard that told me to come and carry away another corpse, but most magazines printed up little three-by-five or so forms, along the general lines of
We regret that your submitted material is not suitable for our needs at this time, but thank you for submitting it.
—THE EDITORS
Wonder's were nothing like that. I usually wrote very short stories, hardly having the confidence to tackle anything much over two thousand words, and so it seemed to me more than once that Wonder's rejections were longer than the stories concerned. There was a form letter signed by Hugo himself, benignly explaining how strict his standards were. There was a printed check-off sheet, listing thirty or so reasons for rejection:
( ) Plot stale
( ) Errors in science
( ) Material offensive to moral standards
and lots more. And, to take the sting out of it, there was a jolly little "translation" of a "Chinese rejection slip." ("Your honorable contribution is so breathtakingly excellent that we do not dare publish it, since it would set a standard no other writer would be able to reach.") It was almost fun to be rejected by Wonder. Impersonal fun, though. Hugo Gernsback was by no means as gregarious a personality as F. Orlin Tremaine.
Their offices were on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, and Dirk and I hiked over there from Brooklyn Tech a time or two. We milled around in the anteroom, under the original oil paintings of covers from his gadget and radio magazines, but we never got past the reception desk. After about two visits the girl made it clear to us that we never would, and so for submissions to Wonder I scraped up stamp money.
I never got past the reception desk at Amazing, either, but T. O'Conor Sloane, Ph.D., did something for me no other editor had done. He made me a pro. Sloane was quite an old man, white-bearded and infirm of gait. He was a marvel to me just on account of age—my own grandfather, who died around that time, was only in his sixties, and Sloane was at least a decade or two past that. But he was amiable and cordial enough; he would totter out to meet me, chat for a moment, and retire with that week's offering in his hand.
His talent as a science-fiction editor was not, I am sorry to say, marked. His scientific attitudes had been fixed somewhere around the rosy twilight of his career, say 1910, and anything since then he dismissed as fantasy. He put himself firmly on record as denying that any human being would ever leave the surface of the Earth in a spaceship, and to us Skylark addicts that was diagnostically treason. What he published was a queer mix of flamboyant space adventure and barely imaginative stories of exploration, all heavily weighted with his interminably balanced blurbs, editorials, and comments on letters.
I cannot resist describing one set of the space adventures for you. They began with a story called "The Jameson Satellite," written by Neil R. Jones. "The Jameson Satellite" was about a very rich university professor who had nothing much to do with his money and nobody to leave it to. He decided to use it to make himself the dandiest tomb a fellow could have, and so he built in his backyard a rocket ship, big and powerful enough to take his body into orbit, where it would circle Earth, preserved by the absolute zero of space, until the end of time. After a while, it all came about as he planned. He died. His executor had his unembalmed corpse loaded into the rocket, they lit the fuse, and zap, there went all that was mortal of Professor Jameson right into orbit.
But there was more. The Earth rolled along. Time passed. The human race became extinct, the sun itself grew cold—and yet Jameson was still there in the deepfreeze. And then, in the fullness of time, strangers came poking around. They were machine-men called Zoromes. They had once had fleshly bodies, more or less like you and me (except that they had tentacles and a few other peculiarities of anatomy), and when they discovered the Jameson satellite with its cargo of still-fresh meat, it was no trouble for them to do with the human corpse what they had done with their own bodies long and long ago: They built him a machine body, took out his brain, thawed it, and stuck it into the machine. And so thereafter, for endless adventures, Professor Jameson lived once again as the Zorome called 21MM392.
The Zorome stories were among the most popular series of the 1930s, and not just with me. There was another reader, a youngster named Bob Ettinger, who liked them as much as I did. A few decades later, when Ettinger was grown up and a scientist on the faculty of a Midwest university, he remembered old Professor Jameson's deepfreeze and wondered just how much science was in that science fiction. So he dug into the biochemistry and the physics, checked out what was known about the effects of liquid gas temperatures on animal tissue, even costed the current quotations for liquid helium and triply insulated containers big enough to hold you and me . . . and evolved the proposal described in his book, The Prospects of Immortality, for freezing everyone who dies until such time as medical science figures out how to thaw him out and repair him. Right now there are a couple of dozen corpsicles in the United States (Walt Disney is supposed to be one of them) waiting for that great thawing-out day. It is not yet clear whether they will make it or not; as Bob Ettinger says, they're halfway there; they've frozen quite a few but haven't thawed any out yet.* But if they do make it, they will owe quite a bit to Neil R. Jones and 21MM392.
* Ettinger is an admirably levelheaded scientist, with an engaging sense of humor. When I asked him once how come there were so few frozen prospects, he shrugged and said, "Many are cold, but few are frozen." |
In my personal scale of priorities, the fact that Sloane gave the world the freezing program is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that he gave me my first paid publication ever. It wasn't a story, it was a poem (called "Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna," and if you feel for any reason that you must read it—I don't know why that would be so—you can find it in a book called The Early Pohl). People ask me from time to time when I made my first sale. For me, that's hard to answer. I wrote the poem in 1935, Sloane accepted it in 1936. It was published in 1937. And I was paid for it in 1938.
Funny thing. I never had another line in Amazing, from that day to this. Sloane actually accepted another poem, and I had bright hopes of laying stories on him as well, but before anything could be published, much less paid for, Amazing too was sold to the knackers, and Sloane disappeared from the science-fiction scene. The new owners made it sell better than it ever had, but by publishing fairly simple-minded stories—or so I judged them; the objective facts are that I didn't care much for what they published, and they didn't care much for what I wrote, and after a while I stopped even trying them. By then I had found more hospitable markets, anyway. But there's a certain nostalgia. You never forget your first sale.
But I am ahead of myself; before I became a Pro I had a few years of fandom to get through, and things had happened in my personal life, too.
My parents separated when I was thirteen years old, not amicably. My plunging father took one shortcut too many and wound up in trouble with the law, not just creditor trouble but grand jury trouble. I was never told the details. One day he was gone, and my mother told me he would not be coming back to live with us any more; it was three or four years before I saw him again, but, in all candor, I didn't much mind. He had seemed a guest in the house all along. He traveled a lot, and even when he was technically at home he was away most of the days, and a lot of the nights.
Looking back at it objectively, it must not have been a tranquil time for me. Yet I don't know where the scars are. Like all writers, I spend a lot of time exploring the inside of my own head, and once or twice I've had professional help in the rummaging around. Like all human beings, I have childhood pains or worries or yearnings unmet that still show up in a barroom or on a couch; how strange that any of the race survives, when we are all so vulnerable in childhood. But I did not feel very bad about my parents at the time. The focus of my life had moved out of the home long before then, perhaps when I learned to live vicariously through books, certainly when I found the world of science fiction to explore. In school and at home I was still a child, the passive object of what the authority figures chose to do; but in science fiction I could be a maker and shaker on my own. Well, no. Not entirely on my own. Don Wollheim was the leader of our junta and the planner of our coups, but we were at the least his kitchen cabinet, Johnny Michel, and a little later Bob Lowndes, and I, and we four marched from Brooklyn to the sea, leaving a wide scar of burned-out clubs behind us. We changed clubs the way Detroit changes tailfins, every year had a new one and last year's was junk.
1934 was the year of the BSFL. 1955 was the year of the ENYSFL, later the ILSF. 1936 was the year of the ICSC, later the NYB-ISA. By 1937 we had got tired of initials, and of laying our cuckoos' eggs in other people's nests, and we formed The Futurians.*
The Brooklyn SFL lasted barely a year, just barely long enough for us to find each other. It did not survive the invasion of the barbarians.
* BSFL: The Brooklyn Chapter of the Science Fiction League, formed by George Gordon Clark. ENYSFL: The East New York (another part of Brooklyn) chapter of the same. ILSF; The same group, gone public and renamed the Independent League for Science Fiction. ICSC: International Cosmos-Science Club. NYB-ISA: The New York Branch of the same, now retitled the International Scientific Association, but still a pure sf fan club regardless. |
The Brooklyn SFL lasted barely a year, just barely long enough for us to find each other. It did not long survive the invasion of the barbarians. G. G. Clark did not care for Donald and Johnny, and must have resented being shoved off the seat of power. ("Am I not Member One? Was I not chartered to possess Chapter One by Hugo himself?") But Hugo had chartered chapters everywhere he could, on whatever flimsy pretext any member had the gall to offer him. Dave Kyle even started a chapter in Monticello, New York, of which the entire membership was pseudonyms of his own. There was already another chapter in Brooklyn, the ENYSFL, and we birds of passage flew on.
The East New York SFL was the fiefdom of a high-schooler named Harold W. Kirshenblit ("KB"), who also had a big cellar his parents allowed him to use for meetings. You took the BMT as far as it went, and then walked. KB was a livelier, sharper article than Clark, willing to make and shake with us, and in no time Donald talked him into seceding from Wonder Stories and creating a new worldwide competitor to the SFL. Donald was not alone—Johnny and I helped in every way we could—but it was Donald's wrath that moved us all, and his decision, I think, to point up what was going on by naming the new construct the Independent League for Science Fiction. Lowndes showed up in the flesh at the ILSF and immediately joined the team. For the next five years or so we four stuck together, called ourselves "the Quadrumvirate," and made our presence known wherever we were. At the end of a year East New York had no further charms, and so we all moved on to Astoria, Queens, where William S. Sykora had a club in his basement. Having a house with a basement was a lot like owning a catcher's mitt; you could always start a game of your own.
Will Sykora was a medium-sized man with enormous sloping shoulders. He had immense self-confidence* and a bump of arrogance that comported ill with our own collective and individual bumps of arrogance. Nevertheless, he had a group that seemed to be doing things. He had called it the International Cosmos Science Club, but on reflection "cosmos" seemed to take in a bit more territory than was justified, and so he changed it to the International Scientific Association. (It wasn't international, either, but then it also wasn't scientific.)
* "There's nothing hard about being a pro science-fiction writer. I could sell Astounding a story if I wanted to. It would take maybe three weeks to figure out what they want."—I heard, and marveled greatly thereat. |
Both the BSFL and the ILSF had published club journals, but they didn't amount to much. The ISA's magazine was something else. It was called The International Observer, and, at least when we spread ourselves on a special issue, it was something to see. I became its editor, and I recall the immense pride of holding in my hand one issue, forty or more pages long, cover silk-screened in color by Johnny Michel, inside with hand-lettered titles and justified margins and even a little bit of art; I think that may have been the biggest fanzine published at that time, and I was supremely certain it was the best.
An issue of a magazine is a kind of work of art. The IO was not just something that had come off a distant printing press, it was a personal part of my life; I had typed every stencil with my own hands, run them off with Johnny and the others on his mimeograph machine, folded the cover and punched in the staples. To me it was a creation. I think maybe there is some criticism that could be made of that auteur approach (what makes me suspect it is that although I clearly remember the scent of the mimeograph ink and the heft of that issue in my hand, I can barely remember a word of what it said inside). But publishing itself is a joy apart from the contents of what it is you publish, something like building ship models in a bottle.
Indeed, it turned out that we sf fanzine people were not alone in the world; there was a whole society of amateur journalists who weren't interested in science fiction but were addicted to the smell of printer's ink. Just as in science fiction, there were feuds and splits among them. The two leading clubs were called the National Amateur Press Association and the United Amateur Press Association of America, and Johnny and Donald and I quickly joined them to see what we could learn.
They were not, in the long run, exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I went to a few meetings. I even went with Donald on the long, thrilling train ride to Boston to attend a weekend amateur-journalist convention, a great excitement to me because I had almost never traveled without some member of my family. They were pretty good people, and I admired what they could do that I could not: most of them owned their own cold-type printing presses, real letterpress instead of the mimeos and hectographs of sf fandom. But most of what was in the magazines they published was about the magazines they published, and it seemed a little too incestuous for my blood. When my first year's membership dues expired, I dropped out.*
* There was a kind of sequel to that. In the 1960s I wrote a fair amount for Playboy and was delighted to do so: not only did they pay an order of magnitude better than the science-fiction magazines, but from time to time I got to meet Hefner and the bunnies. I survived through several changes of editors and thought nothing of it when a new fellow named Robie Macauley became fiction editor. I sent him a few stories, and he bought a reasonable proportion of them. Then one day I happened to be in Chicago on other business, and stopped by the Playboy Building to cement relationships. Turned out Robie had been an ay-jay himself; more, it turned out that we had actually met at that Boston convention, back in the teen-age dawn of time. We had a very pleasant chat, cutting up old touches and parting on the best of terms. Wow! Every young writer's dream come true! The buy-or-bounce guy at a major market turns out to be a boyhood chum! But it didn't work out that way. I never again sold a word to Playboy in all the years Robie was fiction editor. Well. I'm sure it was only coincidence. But all the same, every once in a while I wondered just what I might have said or done, forty years ago in Boston. |
With only three science-fiction magazines and hardly any science-fiction books we were on near-starvation rations of sf-in-print. But there were snacks to be had elsewhere, and once in a while a full meal. And a lot of the nourishment came from science-fiction films.
The 30s were the great years of the film for everyone, not just science-fiction fans. Every hamlet had its own million-dollar Palace of the Movies, plush carpets and tinkling fountains, architecturally a bastard son of the Bolshoi out of the Baths of Caracalla. Most were left over from the manic expansion of the 20s, but nerve was seeping back into the builders. The Radio City Music Hall opened when I was around thirteen. The Music Hall didn't care much for science fiction on its screen, but the hall itself was a kind of science fiction, ultramodern of 1932, and I must have visited it fifty times to see whatever was there to see: my first color film (Becky Sharp); Will Rogers comedies; my first, and almost only, 3-D (a short subject; you wore red and green celluloid goggles to make it work); above all, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, on which I doted. The Music Hall gave you more than a film. There was a stage show with the Rockettes and the Corps de Ballet, and a symphonic overture and an organ interlude, hopefully planned to empty out the house between shows. I had a fixed itinerary at the Music Hall. Up in one of the balconies for the film, so I could smoke. Down in the front rows, far left, to watch Jesse Crawford play the organ at microscopically close range. Middle aisles of the orchestra, two-thirds of the way back, to watch the Rockettes.
But there was a growing amount of science fiction, too, if not in the music hall, then at some other theater, even the "nabes." The original King Kong (only film I have ever seen that gave me nightmares). Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. The very first sf film I saw was Just Imagine, produced in 1930, about the incredibly distant future world of 1980 (autogyro traffic cops, Martians, babies out of a slot machine): it was a slapstick comedy starring El Brendel, notable now mostly because it was the first American film made by lovely Maureen O'Sullivan, later Tarzan's favorite Jane. There were gadgety future-adventure movies like F P 1 Does Not Reply (floating airport in the middle of the Atlantic, where planes refueled en route to Europe) and Transatlantic Tunnel (marvelous zappy machines boring through the undersea rock). There were semi-satirical spoofs like It's Great to Be Alive. What was great about it, for the hero, was that some pestilence had killed every male in the world but him, and he was therefore the object of every girl's affections. It was a musical, and the way the girls courted him was through song and dance numbers.*
* E.g., a troupe of Eastern European lady wrestlers singing: "We are the girls from Czechoslovakia. We are strong, and how we can sock-y-ya." |
Not all of the science-fiction and fantasy films were really much good (as you maybe have already figured out!) but among them there were two that turned me on to a degree no subsequent film has matched.
One of them was Death Takes a Holiday. It starred Fredric March. Its theme music was Sibelius's Valse Triste, which stayed in my mind for months on end. (After a while I wrote words to it, so I could sing it in the shower.) March played the part of Death, proud anthropomorphic Prince of Darkness, sulkily curious about why mortal beings bother living their brief, tatty little lives. He takes time off to visit a house party in Nice or Graustark (villagers tossing rosebuds into an open car, pergolas, drawing rooms, reflecting pools). His intention is to satisfy his curiosity, but he falls in love. While he is on vacation no one dies. Suffering is prolonged. His fellow guests figure out his identity and beg him to get back on the job, but he won't go without the girl. . . . Well, the plot does not bear rational examination, but I loved it. What I love, I love a lot. I saw it twenty-three times.
The other film that blew my mind was Things to Come. I still think it is the finest science-fiction film ever made, greater than Metropolis, more meaningful than 2001. I concede that it looks pretty quaint now, but so will Star Wars in another forty years. I saw Things to Come thirty-three times before I stopped counting. Quite recently I saw it again—in fact, took on the chore of organizing a college science-fiction film festival just to give myself the chance to see it. It is still grand.
Things to Come was the first major film for Ralph Richardson and Raymond Massey, and I have had an immense liking for both of them ever since. It wasn't exactly a story. It was almost a documentary, and financially speaking it was a bomb. But every frame is engraved on my mind. So is Arthur Bliss's score. For years I had the 78-rpm album of the music, until the winter I unwisely left the wax discs on a radiator. Now I have an illicit tape dubbed off the radio, and I still think it's fine. The film was real science fiction, not papier-mâché Godzillas or carrot-shaped Martians. It was written by a real science-fiction writer, in fact the father of us all, old H. G. Wells himself. And it was handsomely filmed with actors who knew what they were about.
Let me confess to something. I think a great deal of Death Takes a Holiday and Things to Come rubbed off in the deep-down core of my brain. I have no particular fear of dying, and I think that one part of the reason for that lies in some subliminal feeling that when it happens it will be old Fredric March who takes me by the hand and says, "Hey Fred, long time no see." And in spite of all the evidence, I am optimistic about the future of the world. I have a conviction bad times and good all pass, and all are endurable, and that is what Things to Come had to say. You can blow up the world as often as you like, but there is a future, there is always a future, and while some of it will be bad, some of it will be better than anyone has ever known.
For the opening of Things to Come we fans got up a real theater party—not a very big one (I think about six of us could afford tickets), but there we were, en masse, going to taste this great new experience together. James Blish, kid fan from far-off East Orange, New Jersey, came in to join us. Like all of us, he wanted to be a writer. Like all of us, he was learning how in the fanzines, publishing one of his own and writing for others. And like a lot of us, he got his heart's desire, with books like Cities in Flight and A Case of Conscience among the long list of first-rate work that only ended with his death, a year or so ago.
Jim Blish from New Jersey, Bob Lowndes from Connecticut—we were becoming quite cosmopolitan. Evidently there were specimens of our own breed in other parts of the world. We had linked up with them through fanzine and letter, but we hungered for the personal contact. And so, one Sunday in 1936, half a dozen of us got on the train for Philadelphia and were met by half a dozen Philadelphia fans, and so the world's very first science-fiction convention took place. Considering the historical significance of the event, it is astonishing how little I remember about what happened there. It's no good looking for the official minutes, either: I was the secretary who took them, and I have no idea where I put them. Philly fan John V. Baltadonis's father owned a bar, and we met in one corner of it for the business part of the session. Robert A. Madle and Oswald Train were part of the Philadelphia contingent, and I still see them pretty regularly at sf conventions; so was Milton A. Rothman, who published a few stories (some of them with me) under the name of Lee Gregor before deciding to devote his time to nuclear physics. From New York were Johnny Michel, Don Wollheim, Will Sykora, Dave Kyle, and myself.
The last convention I went to had four thousand people in attendance, and it was by no means the biggest sf convention ever. There must be a hundred of them a year in the United States, and maybe another hundred here and there in the rest of the world. But that was the first.
By 1937 the ISA had served its function and was off to join the dodo and the diplodocus. There was a change in the scenario, this time. Once we had depopulated the BSFL and the ILSF, their directors, Clark and Kirshenblit, dropped out of science fiction and were seen no more. Willy Sykora was of sterner stuff. He stayed on, joined a new group called the Queens Science Fiction League, and formed powerful alliances with its leaders, Sam Moskowitz and James V. Taurasi. The three of them before long created a whole new wide-ranging group called New Fandom, of which more will be heard later.
What we others did was equally new. Previously we had, cuckoolike, laid our eggs in others' nests. Now we decided to form our own club. Weary of initials, we selected a name for it that did not need truncation: The Futurians.
For that we will need another chapter, but before we get to it there is something else that needs to be spelled out. It was not only science fiction that held some of us together any more. A few of us had found an interest in politics—politics of the left; in fact, one or two of us called ourselves Communists.