10
The Finest Job in the World
In the middle of the 1960s, while I was editor of Galaxy and its satellites, I visited one of my writers at his regular place of employment. His name was L. J. Stecher, and what he did for a living was command the United States Navy guided-missile cruiser Columbus. The ship was tied up in the North River, a mean-looking low gray shape with threatening projections sticking out all over the deck, and when I came to keep our appointment, the Marine guard advised me to get lost. There were no visitors, and no exceptions. I mentioned tentatively that I had been invited by the captain. The Marine came to a Parris Island brace and said no more as he sped me on my way.
Lew took me around his ship with obvious love and pride. I am no fan of armaments. I would see every navy vessel in the world at the bottom of the Pacific if I had my druthers, except for a few light gunboats to keep the dolphin murderers and whale killers in line. But the Columbus was a mighty impressive machine. Those sticky-out things on the decks launched nuclear missiles. Those hooded electric-fan shapes radared the world. The fire-control room was fancier and science-fictiony-er than the bridge of the starship Enterprise. From it, in time of battle, Lew could dispose enough muscle for his one ship, all alone, to have reversed the outcome of any sea battle in the history of the world.
We went back to his quarters, past the Marine guard. We were served a modest dinner by his mess orderly and chatted for a while, partly about the stories Lew had been writing for me, mostly about his ship. There were stars in his eyes when he talked about it. He said at last, "You know, I wouldn't change my job for any other job in the world."
I thought for a minute and said, "You know, neither would I."
From 1960 to 1969 I was the editor of Galaxy and its companion publications. Being an editor is not everyone's cup of tea. In the plate tectonics of the literary world, the place where the editor sits is right at the crunch. The Creative Integrity plate of the writer subducts under the Money-Market Morality plate of the publisher—or the other way around—and mountain ranges are thrown up, laws carven in granite are squeezed into fiery soup, and the flesh-and-blood creature who lives in the interface needs a lot of agility to keep from being maimed. An editor is a clearinghouse for pressures. The printers want their deadlines met. The publisher wants a profit. The writers want—oh, God, what do they not want? An audience. The perfect freedom to say whatever it is they want to say. Cosseting. Coddling. Respect. And money. The agents want money. (And their writers kept off their backs.) The distributors want a product that sells itself. The advertisers want customers. The readers want—well, everything; and no two of them want quite the same everything. The artists, the assistants, the space salesmen, the columnists, the local distributors, the convention committees, the pressure groupies—all of them want something, and there isn't enough of everything to go around, and it is usually the editor who has to grant this and withhold that, steal a day on a printing deadline so an author can finish his third installment, spend a dollar more on a story and take it away from a cover artist, placate a reader who thinks there's too much smut in a story and calm down the writer who thinks too much of the smut has been edited out. I have said that all editors are crazy. Now you know why. The pressures precipitate psychosis, and anyway, nobody but a crazy person would take a job like that in the first place, especially at pitiful money. Which is what most editors of science-fiction magazines get.
But I loved it. I love it still. I have grown accustomed to a lot more solvency as a writer than I ever had from editing Galaxy, but if some sweet-talking devil came by tomorrow with an interesting proposition for a new science-fiction magazine, I would find it very hard to say no.
The great thing about being a science-fiction magazine editor, at least for me, is that it does so feed the vanity. I am sorry to have to admit to this character flaw in myself, but there it is. Those who are repelled by the sight of a naked ego will do us all a great favor by skipping the next paragraph, because in it I propose to brag:
In the decade of the 1960s I published a lot of science-fiction stories, by a lot of writers. Among them was nearly every writer of any importance in the field. For many of the best, I published all or most of the work written in that decade: Robert A. Heinlein, Cordwainer Smith, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, R. A. Lafferty, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and a lot of others. Many of the stories, including many of the best, would never have been written if I hadn't encouraged, coaxed, and sometimes browbeaten the authors. And they were mostly pretty good stories. This is, of course, my subjective opinion. But I think it's right.*
* There is, of course, no such thing as an objective opinion. But if you take the Hugo awards as being as close to such a measure as we've got, then look at Volume Two of Isaac Asimov's The Hugo Winners and count up the numbers which first appeared in my magazines as compared with those which first appeared in all other science-fiction magazines combined. (You can find the provenance in the copyright-acknowledgments page.) The score is Galaxy et al. 9, all others 2. |
The man I worked for was Robert Guinn. He was not really a publisher. He was a printing broker. Publishing was a sideline, operated out of one corner of his office on Hudson Street, down where the trucks line up to head for the Holland Tunnel and New Jersey.
Bob Guinn was an easy person to like. He had a salesman's professional affability, but he also had innate intelligence. He did not always use his smarts in ways that I liked, or his affability, either. What Bob was really great at was reading a balance sheet, and he kept perceiving ways in which we could pay a little less and acquire a little more, all of which it was my duty to resist. And when I came to him with proposals for paying a little more and demanding a little less, his affability took over and he would remember eight new dirty jokes to tell me. So we tangled from time to time, now and then with a certain amount of yelling. But as far as what went into the magazines was concerned, he left me alone to do what I wanted. And that was what I wanted.
All science-fiction magazines had been going through hard times, partly as the result of the post-American News comb-out. Galaxy was at a low point. It had been cut back to bimonthly publication a year or two earlier, and the word rate had been slashed. Once it had paid a three-cent minimum, averaging maybe three and a quarter. Now the average was down around a cent and a half. If, which Bob Guinn had picked up for small money when its Kingston publisher, James Quinn, got tired of it, had been bimonthly for a long time and was paying even less: flat penny a word, take it or leave it. Even at that, both were barely squeaking by.
I didn't like either word rates or the frequency. The proper publication schedule for a science-fiction magazine is every month, and don't argue with me, because I don't know why I am so sure of it. But I am. As to the word rates, John Campbell was paying Galaxy's old prices, three cents per and now and then a little more. I didn't feel I needed to be able to outbid John to get what I wanted, but I did need to be within striking distance. So my first two objectives were to get the rates and frequencies back where they belonged. When I explained this to Bob Guinn, he listened attentively, smiled comprehendingly, told me three quick dirty jokes, and gave me his considered opinion. "Forget it," he said.
If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that there is always a way to do whatever needs doing. All you have to do is find it. So I considered the options. Possibly I could cut the number of pages, and use the savings to pay more to the writers. But there was always the chance that Bob would say, sure, let's cut the pages and keep the savings. Besides, I liked having a lot of pages to play with. Or I might cut back on the art budget, or run a long (and free) letter column. Or—inspiration struck. I went over the inventories to see how much we already owned and how much we had paid for it. Horace and I between us, it turned out, had accumulated quite a few low-rate stories. I decided to accumulate some more. I went through all the submitted manuscripts on hand (there was a fair ish backlog) and found a hundred thousand words or so that I liked reasonably well, without being in love with: the sort of story one is not ashamed to publish, but can face losing without distress. I made the authors low-rate offers on all of these, and most of the offers were accepted. Then I formally announced Galaxy's return to the three-cent minimum, effective at once. By diluting the three-cent material with that handsome reserve of cheaper stuff, I could maintain an average per-issue cost well within the budget and still pay competitive rates for everything new I bought. That would last six issues, I calculated, and by then I would be prepared to fight it out with Bob for a budget increase.
What I wanted was to get first look at most of the uncommitted new material by the pros. In the long run I wanted more than that. I wanted first look at most of the amateur stuff, too, and I also wanted to loosen some of the pros' commitments to Analog, F&SF, and all, but I had other, slower-acting strategies in mind for those efforts.
The money was only Step One in the campaign. Speed of reporting was almost as important, and so I made my first order of business every week to read and respond to the incoming manuscripts, not only the professional submissions but the slush pile as well. It was easy to beat out the competition in that arena. John Campbell ordinarily took a month or more to report. Horace had sometimes been far slower than that. Most of the other magazines had a two-tier system, preliminary reader and then editor; I did all my own reading, and I did it fast, and for at least ninety-five percent of the manuscripts either a buy or a bounce was on its way within forty-eight hours of the time I first saw the script. Of course, most were bounces. I trained my secretaries and assistants, when I had any, to open all incoming manuscripts, put a rejection slip on each one, and put it in an envelope stamped and addressed to go back to the writer. In the event I bought the story, that effort was wasted. But that only happened to one manuscript in twenty or fewer; and for all the others I could read them in the train on my way home to Red Bank and drop them off in the mailbox at the station when I arrived.
Of course, there was more to it than that, but just that much gave me a crack at more than half the stories I wanted. Nothing works perfectly. Some good stories slipped through my net. When they were good enough to make me covetous, I tried to let the author, or his agent, know how I felt, hoping that the next one would come my way.
Once or twice I lost out on a story I really had every right to expect, and that was painful. Cordwainer Smith was one of my favorite writers. He was also a recluse, who didn't want too much contact with the science-fiction world, but we had become friends and he had voluntarily promised to give me first look at everything he wrote. Unfortunately, he had taken on an agent. The agent was willing to live by Paul's * commitments, but he also had certain standard rules of procedure. One was that he never under any circumstances submitted two stories by the same writer to an editor at one time. When Paul happened to finish two scripts on the same day and sent them off to the agent in the same envelope, the agent sent me the one he liked best and mailed the other off to Fantasy and Science Fiction. By the time I found out about it, they had already accepted it, which is why I didn't get to publish "On Alpha-Ralpha Boulevard"; but I then persuaded that agent to change that rule.
* "Paul" because his real name, of course, was Paul M. A. Linebarger. Until his death he was a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a frequent consultant on sensitive Far East matters for the State Department—one reason for his keeping his real identity secret. |
It was Galaxy that I was trying to make the leader in the field again. If was only a stepsister, but I had a good use for it. Most writers are in-and-outers, something good and then a few that are not so good. The best ones I wanted for Galaxy. The others I didn't. It's hard to deal with that sort of writer when you have only one magazine. You can't publish everything without sacrificing overall quality. But you know perfectly well (assuming the author is as good as you think he is) that someone else will publish the ones you turn down. There is always the risk that the suitor who soothes his feelings by buying the one you bounced will win him away with the next good one, too. If, with its lower rate, gave me a perfect dumping ground for the stories I didn't want to print in Galaxy but didn't want anyone else to have, either. If was also a good place to try out new talent.
There were, at least in my head, significant policy differences between the two magazines. Good gray Galaxy was the class leader. It paid a lot more for what it published, and took a lot more planning and care. Galaxy was edited for the mature, sophisticated science-fiction reader. If you could read only one magazine in the field but wanted to be au courant parfaitement, Galaxy was the magazine to read.
If was for the younger reader, and the newer, and the less involved. Editing If was almost recreational. If I had a whim not solid enough to call an inspiration, I tried it in If. In terms of literary quality and significance, I have no doubt that Galaxy was a better magazine than If, but If was a lot easier to turn around. It was cheaper to produce. Its budget was lower. It had less of a distinguished history for the readers to compare the current product against. I was able to make If show a profit long before Galaxy did.
And it was If that caught the fancy of the readers. What was fun for me seemed to be fun for them. Or maybe it was for another reason.
Early on I was sitting with another editor at a world convention banquet when Hugo time came around. He picked up the best-editor trophy. I was as generously congratulatory as my mean little envious spirit would allow. He mumbled something, glowered at his coffee cup for a while, and then leaned over and whispered in my ear: "You know, considering how little I've done on the magazine the past couple of years, it begins to look like the less I do the better the readers like it." It was almost the same with me. I never won a Hugo for Galaxy, but I won three in a row for its little stepsister, If.
By the time my stores of cheap stories were running low, the magazines were showing signs of returning financial health. I hit Bob up for a budget increase. He smiled and tousled my hair and told me six dirty jokes. I came back to it the next week, and the week after, and when he had used up all the dirty jokes he knew, he gave in. Sweet Old Bob! I always called him that. Or sometimes just the initials.
The next step was to make the magazines monthly, and that was a whole nother story. Alarmed by the fact that he had lost the battle of the budget, Bob summoned up reinforcements.
The thing about Bob Guinn was that he knew he wasn't a publisher, and so he decided to hire a publisher to do the job for him. Now, this will seem strange to many writers and editors. What job? they will ask. What is it that a publisher does do?
I can understand this confusion, because I have worked for and with a lot of publishers in my day, and I am still not sure exactly what it is that some of them were doing. One used to lock himself in his 16' X 28' office every morning and read comics. Another spent his first year of incumbency in taking every single employee off the job he was doing and putting him on some other job, so that no one in the office but he would know exactly what was going on. Another spent his time padding down the office corridors and peering in at each desk to make sure the person was sitting there. Another was hired, I think, mostly to yell. There are some great creative publishers in the world—Oscar Dystel and Ian Ballantine are the two I see the most of—but there are also hell's own herd of turkeys.
Nevertheless, there are certain publishing functions which have to be done. They aren't fun or glamour things, but they make an immense difference to the success of a publication. In large corporations they are divided among a multitude of departments, and the publisher's main function is as a sort of KP-pusher, making sure that everybody does his job and knocking heads together when needed. Galaxy Publishing Corporation was nothing like that. The editorial, promotion, publicity, and advertising departments were combined into one person, me. That left out a lot of nitty-gritty, mostly production and distribution. Production is a matter of seeing that type is set and paper is on hand and copies are printed and bound. That was Bob's area of special expertise as a printing broker, anyway, so there was no problem in leaving that to him. Distribution is concerned with keeping the national distributor on his toes, checking his draw-and-return figures to see that copies of the publication are going more or less where they might be bought instead of to six all-night delicatessens in LaPorte, Indiana. Bob was less good at that, but even so, better than I was.
Dealing with distributors is not the most fun there is. The standards of the trade are higher now than they used to be, but there was a time when your average local wholesaler had got most of his training in the newspaper circulation business, in the days when the standard ploy for bettering your sales was to tip over the other fellow's delivery trucks. One national distributor of a few years ago was run by a troika. Two of them had served time in prison, and the other had got his start peddling pirated song sheets, I took a couple of local wholesalers to a science-fiction convention once and showed them the costume ball. One femme fan had a lovely butterfly costume, weeks of painful sewing and a lot of creative thought; the two wholesalers showed their first signs of interest when she came by. One said, "Hey, I like that," and the other said, "Me, too. Will she fuck?"
Bob was not too rarefied a soul to be exposed to such crudities, but even he came back from some excursions into distribution with horror on his face. There was a large newsstand near his summer home; it sold six or eight hundred copies of The New York Times every Sunday . . . and two copies of Galaxy every month. Bob suggested to the dealer that he ask for more. The dealer said he had, dozens of times. The two copies he did get he kept under the counter for regular customers, and he was sure he could sell plenty more. But the distributors would not be bothered. So Bob took fifty copies out of the warehouse and put them in the back of the car, and the dealer put them on his shelves. And forty-six of them sold. And so Bob went triumphantly to the wholesaler and said, "See? Why don't you ship them fifty copies every issue now?" And the distributor said (paraphrasing out some of the more colorful parts), "Why, no, Mr. Guinn, I wouldn't care to do that, and because of that dealer's presumption we won't ship him any copies of Galaxy at all any more."
Well. That was a while ago, and the elder statesmen of the distribution business have now largely retired to their villas outside Palermo. The new generation is a lot easier to get along with. But still it is no job for an amateur.
So when Bob proposed to employ a professional publisher, I was all for it. In due course into the office came Sol Cohen, former VP at Avon Books, recently retired with enough capital-gains on his stock participation to be in little need of employment, but not ready to quit working entirely.
I spent a lot of time with Sol over the next couple of years. He has strengths and weaknesses. In the right place he would be a valuable natural resource for a publishing company. I don't think Galaxy was the right place. The size of the numbers involved was an order of magnitude smaller than he was used to. His experience was with paperback books, rather than with magazines. And he had much too much interest in the editorial aspects of the business to suit me. We had that out early. After a few tentative engagements he never interfered with my editorial decisions on the magazines but took out his ambitions on side ventures: a series of anthologies for a small paperback house; a book-magazine hybrid of our own called "Magabook," which struggled through a couple of issues but never really got off the ground. What he did do was spend a lot of time with the distributor, which I welcomed a lot. What I welcomed less was that on any major changes of policy I now had two people to convince instead of one.
My big remaining ambition was to make both Galaxy and If monthly. I had totally failed to persuade one person. Confronting two was disheartening. But I wanted it too much to accept defeat. While both magazines were in the red I could see that it wasn't a good idea to lose twice as much by bringing one of them out twice as often. But then, when If struggled its way into the black, I announced that it was now time to switch it over to a monthly schedule. really?" said Bob, and "That's a big step, Fred," said Sol; and the two of them went off and conferred. They came back with the decision that it wasn't a good idea to mess with a profitable proposition by making a change in frequency, either. Oh, shit, I said, look! If you don't want to go monthly when it's losing because it's losing, and don't want to go monthly when it's making because it's making, then when, pray, is the time when one does go monthly? They admitted that was a good question. They talked it over for another eternity or two and then, reluctantly, agreed to roll the dice for an experimental period. We'll make If monthly for six months, they said. No promises beyond that! If it's doing all right at the end of the six months, we'll keep it up. If not, back to bimonthly and no more arguments. Fine, said I, my heart singing.
That meeting took place in the afternoon of the last Thursday in August of 1962. I know the date well, because the next day I was to leave for the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago. In fact, that was why I had pressed the issue at that time. What I was trying to do was to generate and maintain momentum. I had bumped the rates, improved relations with a lot of writers, got some talk going, acquired some significant stories. The next thing I wanted was to be able to tell that convention that If was going to be monthly again. Happy as I knew how to be, I went home and packed, collected Carol, caught a plane, and arrived in Chicago to find a telegram waiting at the hotel:
ON NO ACCOUNT MENTION POSSIBLE MONTHLY SCHEDULE FOR IF PENDING FINAL DECISION.
SOL
"Possible" monthly publication? I got on the phone. But by then, of course, it was Labor Day weekend. I couldn't reach either Sol or Bob to ask them what the hell they thought they were playing at. When the convention was over and I was back in New York, I found out: they had got to thinking after I left. And they had chickened out.
I've said that Bob and I got along well most of the time, barring occasional yelling. That was one of the times for yelling.
Although I had been talking about it for months, I think they had never really perceived how important it was to me. They thought it over for a while and then decided to placate me. Look, said Bob (or Sol), we're just scared to make a move with either If or Galaxy. We're sorry we are, but we are. But if you're all that ape-shit for a monthly magazine, we'll tell you what we'll do. We'll start a third magazine for you. We'll make that one monthly.
That took me aback. The last thing I wanted right then was another magazine. It seems to me that a magazine, any magazine, is or at least ought to be a living creature. It should have a personality and an identity of its own. Not part of a litter; an individual. I was a long way from attaining that with either of the two magazines I already had.
On the other hand, my bluff was called. It was an offer I could not turn down. I figured, fuzzily enough, that maybe I could start the new one and make it work as a monthly, then merge it with, say, If. I would insist on maintaining the monthly schedule with the new composite, I dreamed; and then, when that had been shown to work, it would be easy enough to get Galaxy back up there, too. . . .
So I accepted the deal and got to work. We picked out a title: Worlds of Tomorrow. We designed a logo. I bought the stories. We signed a distribution contract. We sent the first issue off to the printer. . . .
By then I was beginning to see flaws in my rosy reasoning. Suppose it did work as a monthly. I had had no luck at all in getting Bob and Sol to change the frequency of If or Galaxy. Just what would be my chances of getting them to kill a moneymaker in order to merge it with another book?
But in the long run it didn't matter. The problem never came up. By the time Worlds of Tomorrow came out, Bob and Sol had had another failure of nerve. The test project designed to establish the potential of monthly publication, too, was a bimonthly.*
* I did, finally, get both magazines on a monthly schedule, but not for a few more years. It made little difference one way or another to the sales. |
Worlds of Tomorrow lasted several years, and even published some pretty good stories that I might not have been able to get into either If or Galaxy. In order to distinguish it from the rest of the herd, I had decided to feature long, complete-in-one-issue seminovels, and there were some fine ones by Gordon R. Dickson, Philip K. Dick, and others. But I had also decided to try to include some material on extrapolative science—not exactly fact, but not exactly science fiction, either. They were, I thought, among the best things in the magazine. We had a series on future weaponry written by someone who knew the subject so well that he could not use his own name. And we had freezing.
Shortly after the magazine was born, I found in the slush pile something that was not exactly a manuscript. It was a privately printed, spiral-bound book called The Prospect of Immortality, by someone called Robert C. W. Ettinger.
One of the interesting fringe benefits of a career in science fiction is that one gets to hear from a lot of geniuses, and from a lot of nuts. It is not always easy to tell at first encounter which is which. I looked at the book without much enthusiasm. Then, as I began to read it, Ettinger began to come through as a person who had had a wild idea that might—that just possibly might—really work.
The argument of the book was easy enough to follow:
If you wanted to live forever, there was at least a reasonable hope that the technology to make that possible was already at hand. By following certain simple directions, you might never die—or, more accurately, if you did die now and then, it needn't be fatal.
How was this to be achieved?
By means of the deepfreeze, said Ettinger. Go ahead and live your life. Die when you have to. Then, at the moment of death, have your body popped into a freezer. A cold freezer, around the temperature of liquid nitrogen, maybe even liquid helium. You could keep an organic substance—including your very dear own personal body—at liquid-gas temperatures without essential change for a long time. No physical change. No chemical change. No chemical processes taking place at all, except for a little free-radical activity, glacially slow and not to be worried about. There might be a touch of radiation damage from prolonged exposure to cosmic rays—but not quickly. Not for days, weeks, months, or centuries. Perhaps not even for millions of years.
And this, said Ettinger, was not theory, it was scientific fact.
That was one of the two bases his plan rested on. The other was not exactly a fact, but it certainly seemed at least a good gambling bet. That was that medical science would continue to learn. Sooner or later, Ettinger said, doctors would know how to do three things at present difficult or impossible: (1) how to cure or repair whatever damage had killed you in the first place; (2) how to repair whatever additional damage had been done to your body by the freezing process itself—mostly cellular damage from the phase-change of water to ice; (3) how to start you up again (as we now are able to start up again people who through drowning or electroshock or heart arrest would once have been buried instead). All this might take some time, he conceded. But dreaming away in the deepfreeze, time was what you had plenty of.
Was this science fiction or a real hope? Did it mean that some real person now in the agony of terminal cancer could really have some expectation, however slim, of living once more in health and comfort?
I was no authority on any of these subjects. I am no real authority on most subjects, for that matter; but the nature of an editorial job is that ignorance is no excuse. Whether you know enough to make a decision or not, you still have to make the decision. And I was impressed by the amount of homework Ettinger had done. He had calculated the replenishment rate for liquid nitrogen as it bubbled off the cooling jacket around the corpsicles and had looked up the market price for LN2. The idea was science fiction. In fact, I had read it in a story by Neil R. Jones back in the early 1930s.* But Ettinger had put numbers into it. He had gone beyond that. He had considered the religious, moral, political, and ecological consequences of what he proposed, and found the arguments for all of them. His own credentials were satisfying. He was on the physics faculty of a respectable university; and in every case where I knew enough to decide whether a statement of his was true or false, it was true.
* "The Jameson Satellite." It turned out little Bobby Ettinger had read the same story at around the same time. |
None of that proved that freezing would work. But it was not to be dismissed as a crackpot pipe dream. So I made arrangements to publish an extract from his book, and it appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow.
When I finally had the printed issue in my hand, I perceived, a little belatedly, that here at last was a chance to do what I had always wanted to do: to use the electronic media to publicize science fiction.
By then I had become fairly accustomed to microphones and cameras. In particular, I had become a regular on the all-night radio talkathons run by Long John Nebel in New York City.
Long John was (and is) the king of nighttime radio. He is a legend in his own right, professional photographer and roadside auctioneer turned radio personality, with a slavishly devoted audience of all-night short-order cooks, nurses, night watchmen, students, and insomniacs. First to last, I've done the Long John show maybe four hundred times. And maybe four hundred times I've asked myself what I was doing there.
One reason, I guess I have to admit, is that I seem to have a fondness for the sound of my own voice. Another reason is Long John himself, marvelous quirky man that he is. Most of all, it is because I have met a great many interesting people in Long John's studios: scientists, writers, politicians, flying-saucer nuts (and also, I add at once, UFO experts who are not at all nutty); that human killing-machine, Roy Cohn; the late H. L. Hunt, roly-poly right-wing Santa Claus who called himself "the richest Gentile in the world"; * Gene Leonard, the cybernetics-systems genius who single-handedly caused New York City's worst newspaper strike by automating the composing room of The New York Times; Mel Torme, the great old "Velvet Fog" himself; admired comedians like Phil Foster and Victor Borge—well, for four hundred shows I imagine I could think of four hundred names. Some have become good friends, and one or two I will consider myself very fortunate if I never see again. Collectively it was like an immense, never-ending cocktail party. I've appeared on several hundred radio and TV shows in perhaps twenty countries, but the one I keep coming back to is Long John. If I'm not on it for more than a month or so, I get withdrawal symptoms.**
* I thought his political notions were pathetic when they weren't despicable, but I must say that I thought H. L. Hunt himself was rather sweet. We had coffee together. Guess who picked up the check. I'll give you a hint: it wasn't the richest Gentile in the world. ** As this book was in proof Long John died of cancer. For millions of listeners, the night air will be bleaker. |
What I did not do all those Long Johns for was to sell my books.
I may have had some such notion in the beginning, but I learned better. I'm not sure that it's possible at all to promote science fiction by radio or TV exposure. The electronic audience is too broad-based and, forgive me, too ignorant. Ignorant of what science fiction is all about. I don't mean to put the mundanes down, but science fiction is a special taste. Most people who don't read it anyway are not going to be moved to do so by hearing me chatter between midnight and six a.m.
But freezing—ah, that was something else! That was the exact kind of thing that one could promote on radio and TV, and Long John had exactly the right program to do it on.
I was in a peak period with Long John at the time, doing the show at least once a week and sometimes three or four times. When I mentioned Ettinger's idea to John, he jumped at it. We scheduled a show right away, and the response was immense. The phones at the Galaxy Publishing Corporation office began ringing as soon as the doors were open, listeners who wanted to know where they could buy the article we had been talking about. We did a repeat show, and then another, and then got Ettinger himself on the air for one of them. By phone. John had no budget for flying guests in from Michigan, and neither did I. I took the show on the road, to other radio and TV shows in New York. A year or so later I wrote a lead Playboy article about life prolongation in general, and Playboy's fantastically competent public-relations person of the time, Tania Grossinger, booked me onto every radio and TV show I had ever heard of, and some I hadn't, from Johnny Carson on down. And on all of them I talked about Ettinger's freezing program. After I had done this maybe fifty times, it began to enter my slow, tiny mind that maybe Bob Ettinger would feel a little resentment at somebody else's taking his very own idea and running around the country with it. He came to New York around then and we had dinner.* I waited for a suitable moment and then asked him if he, well, minded my talking so much about his brainchild. Bob smiled his slow, gentle smile and said, "Not a bit. You see, I'm very selfish. I want to be an immortal superman. In order to make that possible, it has to be possible for everybody else to be one, too, and any way that happens is all right with me." So the Chautauqua went on. It didn't do an awful lot for Worlds of Tomorrow. That one first issue had a hell of a sale, but little of it carried over to any other issue. It did, I think, do something for the freezing program.
* His uncle joined us for dinner. This is not the sort of thing that I usually think worth mentioning, but Bob Ettinger's uncle is Peewee Russell, who just happens to be maybe the greatest jazz clarinetist who ever lived. |
Because of all this, a lot of people I meet seem to think that I am one of the elect. I'm not. It isn't that I don't believe it might work. I thought the chances reasonably good when the whole notion was only a gleam in Bob Ettinger's eye. Now there is a lot more substance for the opinion. There are freezing organizations in half a dozen countries. They publish journals. They conduct research. They've even frozen eighteen or twenty real people who are now lying in their big thermos bottles with the liquid N2 percolating around them,* waiting for that great thawing-out day. There are thousands of card-carrying immortals in the United States alone. The cards are real. They look like Medic-Alert IDs, and they say:
NOTICE!
If you find me dead, immediately pack me in dry ice and call the number below. On no account autopsy, embalm, fold, spindle, or mutilate me.
* If you are astute enough to have noticed that I said "helium" earlier, you can also probably figure out that the reason for the change to nitrogen was financial. |
Or words to that effect. To be sure, nobody has yet been defrosted. And yet I still think it's a good enough gambling bet, viewed as a sort of Pascal's Wager. As Ettinger says, the worst that can happen is that it won't work, in which case you are no deader than you would have been anyway.
The reasons I have for not signing up to be an immortal superman are philosophical and economic. Philosophical: what makes my life desirable to me is the network of relationships and the endless iterative series of projects that I am always involved in. Stop them and restart them at some future time, and they are no longer the same. Economic: freezing costs. I estimated when I first heard of it that it would take easily fifty thousand dollars cold cash to make and protect a corpsicle. Now I would put it a lot higher. So buying the chance of a future postfreeze life costs some sacrifice in this one; and it seems to me that I'm more interested in the quality of my life than in the quantity of it.
As I indicated a while back, Bob Ettinger was not the only person to turn up in my life with something to say that he wanted the whole world to hear. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are obvious crackpots. With some it's hard to tell. You never know. Maybe this year's Newton or Faraday is sitting in your waiting room, dabbing Clearacil on his chin. I have had at least five visitors and correspondents who had worked out the long-sought replacement for Einstein's Unified Field Theory, a dozen who have solved all the secrets of the mind, twenty with new religious revelations, and God's own horde of flying-saucer people. Some I can dismiss pretty easily. If they speak in koans and giggle at the doorknob, I just don't listen, especially if they tell me they know someone who can read minds, or bend keys, or foretell the future. It isn't that I am certain none of this is possible. Au contraire. I hope; and I wish with all my heart that it were real. But all the evidence for ESP, any kind of ESP, is terrible. It isn't just that it is bad, it is evidence of that special kind, like the evidence for Laetrile or for the existence of God, which is utterly conclusive to people who are already convinced, and not worth examining to people who aren't. As far as I know (which is far), there has never been a test of ESP ability conducted under conditions of enough rigor to eliminate the chance of cheating. Most of the great psychics have been caught faking. Most of the serious researchers, however bright and honorable, have shown themselves pitifully gullible. I'd love to believe in ESP, but the frauds and the dupes won't let me.
In this arrogant, hard-nosed skepticism, which has won me many enemies, I am aided and abetted by my friend and neighbor, The Amazing Randi, who is even more hostile to the whole paranormal performance than I am. Randi has a standing offer to me to duplicate any "psychic" feat I can describe, under the same conditions as it was done by the alleged psychic. He has made good on it so many times, that I no longer bother to test him out. He has even taught me how to do some of the simpler routines, including the Uri Geller metal-bending event (with which I dazzled Arthur Clarke first time out), the Moscow-Leningrad Ladies' Paranormal Tube-Spinning Feat (that takes a little more skill, but sometimes I can make it work), and the jazziest demonstration of infallible mind reading I have ever seen, so good that I hate even to talk about it. If I ever find myself weakening and beginning to believe in ESP, all I have to do is call Randi up, and at any hour of the day or night he will come over and talk to me until I am through the crisis. And yet—And yet, well, look, folks. There is still that little part of the inside of my mind that wants to believe in ESP. And it is not entirely unsupported by my observation of the world. I have as many anecdotal experiences of ESP as anyone else. I can clearly remember a number of occasions when I knew what the next card in a deck was going to be. (But there were also a lot of occasions when I knew it just as well, but was wrong.) I have called friends to have them say they had just been thinking of me; burst into song at exactly the same moment as a companion burst into the same song; had a flash of inspiration that told me where to find a lost object. A few years ago, in Barletta, Italy, my wife and I were walking aimlessly about, and I mentioned to her that when I had been there last, twenty-odd years before, I had had a friend who lived in an interesting apartment on a courtyard. What kind of a courtyard? she asked. Well, I said, a lot like that one. And it turned out to be the very house. I can multiply anecdotes as long and as tediously as you can, whoever you are. But anecdotal evidence isn't any kind of proof. As the French say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
But then there's the case of the ESP teaching machine.
In 1972 I was invited to a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Seminar on Speculative Technology. It was a great weekend, one of the most exciting I've ever spent. A physicist from Stanford Research Institute named Russell Targ turned up with what he called an ESP teaching machine.
That was not the only attraction of the weekend; in fact, it was only a little extra helping of dessert to a marvelously stimulating meal. But I was taken with the machine. It was about the size of a bedside clock radio. The front of it displayed four colored slides, with lights behind them. Under each slide was a button. Inside the machine was a random-number generator, on the basis of which the machine would decide in advance which slide it was going to light up.
What one did with the machine was to try to guess which slide that was going to be. Having made your guess, you pushed the button for the slide you expected. Then the machine lit up the slide it had decided on. Sometimes it would be yours, of course. More probably it would not. You only had one chance in four of guessing correctly.
At the top of the machine a counter registered how many times you had guessed, and how many of those times you had been right. It was set to record a run of twenty-four trials—in which, of course, chance expectancy was that you would get six right. If you did get six, or five, or seven, that was all that happened. If you got substantially more (or less) than chance, the machine would light up a panel saying "significant to one standard deviation," "to two standard deviations," etc.*
* There is a more complete description of a slightly different form of the machine in Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American. Martin was not as impressed by it as I was. |
It was a fun machine.
I played with it a lot—when I could get it away from the fifty other invited attendees at the seminar, Arthur Clarke and Marvin Minsky, Wernher von Braun and Krafft Ehricke, Bob Forward and Ed Mitchell. The first run I tried was significant to two standard deviations! Wow! My second run was a little on the low side. My third was lower still. I didn't really keep a careful count, but actually after about ten runs the pluses and minuses pretty much evened out, so that there was no significant indication of anything happening one way or another.
All that is true, but in the interest of accurate reporting I must record one additional datum.
I am not sure nothing significant happened, because over the several hundred trials there were a few cases, maybe fifteen or twenty in all, when what I did was a little different from all the other cases. In those cases I observed myself reaching out to press one button, drawing my finger back, and then pressing another. I don't mean that I just hesitated, or pushed a button I didn't intend. I mean my finger actually touched one, and then ultimately pressed another. And on those few trials, under those circumstances, I wasn't right just the chance twenty-five percent of the time, I was right more than half the time.
Does that prove anything?
No, not even to me. It is more anecdotage. I didn't keep a count, my impressions are subjective and, anyway, there simply were not enough trials to mean anything. But I sure would like to borrow that machine for a week or two and try it all over again, with an objective observer to record what was going on and a careful tally of results.
That sort of approach to ESP is fun. What is a lot less fun is having someone tell me about the strange experience his uncle had in Palo Alto, California (I just won't listen), and what is hardly any fun at all is having someone tell me about his own experience when it is apparent that there is something going on beyond the objective interest in ESP. A majority of ESP proponents make me feel acutely uncomfortable. Some are plainly and offensively out to hoodwink me and the world. Some have hoodwinked themselves. A lot are just pathetic. One of the unhappiest hours I ever spent was with one of the pathetic ones, a nice-looking, middle-aged lady who came to the Galaxy offices one day with a tale of woe.
It seemed she was being victimized by a ring of telepaths in Short Hills, New Jersey. The telepaths were all young and male. Some of them were black. They were listening in on all of her most secret thoughts, especially sexual ones. They were spying on her every hour of the day and night, and she could feel them ridiculing her and treating her with contempt. It was hard for her to discuss the worst parts of it with me, a strange male, because she was too well brought up to say the specific things easily. But obviously she was in serious torment of the soul.
I really did not know what to do with her. I tried to suggest that she might be imagining the whole thing. Oh, no! She was certain it was all real. I hinted that she might find it useful to talk to a doctor. The doctors hadn't been able to do a thing for her. She was at her wit's end. After an hour or so of her gentle weeping, I found a solution—not to her problem, just to mine.
I said, yes, thinking it over, she had actually made a wise decision in coming to the editor of a science-fiction magazine to tell her problem to. The only mistake she had made was in choosing the wrong editor. And I sent her up to John Campbell's office.
Having alienated maybe a third of potential friends by saying that I don't think the evidence for ESP is any good, I think it is now my obligation to alienate another third by saying that I think the evidence for flying saucers is even worse.
I have to admit that my early exposure to flying-saucer people was not, on the whole, the kind that conduces to reasoned investigation. Most of them I met on the Long John show. John made his reputation with them in the early days, people who claimed the saucer folk had flown them from the White Sands Proving Ground to lower Yonkers and back, people who had been given the ultimate secrets of the universe to pass on to the rest of us. ("Love thy neighbor and eat lots of yogurt.") I hate myself when I attach pejorative labels to any group of human beings. So it is hard for me to say that all those early saucerers were either nuts or con men. But that was the way to bet it.
And one time on Long John's show, just before we went off the air, I said so.
Before I was out of the studio the phone was ringing. It was from a man named George Earley, Connecticut State Chairman for the National Investigating Committee on Aerial Phenomena. "See here," said George, "NICAP has in its files thousands of reported UFO sightings. Have you investigated them all? Come to that, have you investigated any of them? Or are you just taking the word of such notorious saucer skeptics as Willy Ley and Lester del Rey?"
Well, he had me fair and square. I had to admit it. I had never for one minute believed that any of the flying-saucer reports were really related to visitors from another planet, and I had not bothered to check any of them out, or even, really, to think about them much.
It is an interesting fact that almost all science-fiction writers are UFO skeptics. They always have been. Even John Campbell, who was perfectly capable of swallowing astrology, dianetics, and the Dean Drive, gagged on the saucer people. I think I know why. You cannot spend a large fraction of your life reading and writing about life on other planets without absorbing the notion that (as Einstein put it *) "the universe is not only stranger than we know, it is stranger than we can know." Stories like Kenneth Arnold's "disks that moved with a saucer-like motion," the contactees' pale, somber humanoids in Grecian togas, machines that stop car motors—they aren't too fantastic for science-fiction people to believe in; they aren't fantastic enough. A diet of ionized intelligences from the electrified planets of Betelgeuse immunizes you against little green men with red eyes.
* Ben Bova says it was J. B. S. Haldane. |
The other thing that has turned so many of us against the UFO reports is that so many of them are pathetic and palpable frauds. But that's not important, George Earley responded to that. There can be a million frauds. But if there is one true, indisputable account of a visitation from another planet, that is the most significant event in human history, and it outweighs all the frauds a millionfold. And that is true enough; and before I got off the phone, I promised George that I would either look into the matter seriously or keep my mouth shut.
So for two or three years, as time permitted, I looked into the flying-saucer world. I read all the recommended books. I went to UFOlogists' meetings. I interviewed celebrated contactees. I even visited the scenes of some of the most famous sightings to glean what wisdom I could from the physical surroundings.
Since I put in so much time on it, I would like to salvage something from the effort and tell you at some length about the flakes and frauds I met along the way. But I don't think it would interest you. It doesn't even interest me. There were a lot who were just not able to distinguish between fact and fantasy, and another lot whose dull lives had suddenly been brightened by the attention they got from claiming to have met aliens. There were also a few who were making a solid buck by preaching to the gullible, and I liked them least of all.
And then there were the ones who were simply uncritical, and maybe a little ill-informed: a lady at a cocktail party who said, gosh, she'd seen plenty of UFOs in her time; there were quite a lot of them, flashing red and green lights, almost every night, over near where the helicopters landed. ("You mean you saw flashing red and green lights over near where the helicopters land and you call them Unidentified Flying Objects?") And there was the New Mexico state cop in Socorro, showing Jack Williamson and me around the site where his colleague, Lonnie Zamorra, had had a famous sighting just a short time before. He also had seen UFOs, he said proudly, pointing off past the drive-in theater in the general direction of White Sands Proving Ground. He had seen one just the night before. It started out as a fairly bright yellowish light, zigzagged around the sky, growing dimmer and oranger, and finally disappeared. Jack and I looked at each other. As former Air Force weathermen, we had launched enough pilot balloons to recognize the description at once.
I must not give the impression that every UFO person I met was wicked or dumb, or even careless. George Earley is not at all like that. Neither was the aforementioned Lonnie Zamorra. I didn't ever meet him face to face, but I spoke to him by phone, talked to his colleagues on the police force and people in the town, and I have to say he has the best testimonials to his honesty of anyone I can think of. ("Lonnie could be wrong, but he'd never make anything up.")
Barney and Betty Hill, the famous "interrupted journey" couple from New England, were not only decent and respectable people but, in the short time I spent with them, made me think of them as friends.
I believe that Lonnie Zamorra saw something; I just don't think it was an alien spacecraft. The late Dr. Donald Menzel thought it might have been a dust devil, which fits the facts at least as well as an alien spacecraft does. With the Hills, the story is a little more complicated. As it is reported, they were taken from their car one night, hypnotized, introduced to aliens in a spaceship, commanded to forget the whole experience, and returned to their car. Obediently, they had no conscious recollection of any of this. Then, much later, Barney had occasion to visit a shrink, who put him under hypnosis for other reasons, and the whole story came out. (And was confirmed by Betty, also under hypnosis.) What Barney said to me was that he was sure something had happened that night, but he was not entirely sure whether it happened in objective reality or only in their minds. And if he wasn't sure, how can any of the rest of us be?
The Hills offered me a chance to listen to their tapes next time I was in Boston, for what help it might give me. We actually made a date to do it. But my plans changed, I didn't go to Boston when I thought I would, I put off making a special trip; and then I learned that Barney had died. I wish now I had gone a little farther out of my way, not only to hear the tapes but because I liked Barney and Betty Hill.
UFOlogists complain that there is damn-all thorough and objective independent investigation of the saucer situation. They're absolutely right. The only people who are motivated to put a lot of time into it are those who are already believers. Skeptics and the uncommitted may poke around in the field for a while as I did, but then they get bored—as I did. J. Allen Hynek is one skeptic who became a believer. He is a smart, sane, and well-informed person, and he has a project which I would like to see tried. The FBI, says Hynek, graduates a new class of agents every few months. For a graduation exercise they assign them an event—maybe a real crime, maybe a made-up incident—and the whole class swarms out over the area, interviewing everybody to put together a synoptic report of the whole occurrence. Well, says Hynek, since they're doing that anyway, why not one time turn all that talent loose on a reported sighting? Talk to everybody. Balance the accounts against each other. Resolve the contradictions. Sift out the facts. And, for once, see for sure whether the thing happened or not.
This strikes me as an eminently workable idea; I've already written my own congressman to tell him I'd like to see it done, and maybe one day it will be. I wish it had been done with the Hills, or Lonnie Zamorra; and I'll admit that in my heart I kind of wish that it had proved them right. I wish, in fact, that I could believe any of the stories about sightings of alien spacecraft, because it would give me pleasure to have some proof that we are not alone in the universe.
But I don't.
The statistics are against it. Even without a full-dress FBI investigation, confirming witnesses should have turned up to Zamorra or the Hills. None ever did. And with all those thousands of sightings, there should have been one that simply could not be dismissed. But there isn't.
Logic is against it, too. Put it this way: if there really is an intelligent alien race capable of building ships of any of the sorts described, they would have to be pretty smart, right? At least as smart as, say, you and me? Well, then why don't they act that way? I promise you that if I were an alien intelligence interested in finding out about the Earth, I would find a hell of a lot better way to do it than those dummies have.
So, after a couple of years of this, I wrote George Earley a letter:
Dear George:
I kept my promise. I looked into the evidence. And I still don't believe.
You can't stay in the same house for more than a quarter of a century without putting out some sort of roots into the community, and by the early 1960s I had acquired a couple. We had a bad fire around then: a defective electric-blanket switch started a bed smoldering when no one was looking, and by the time anyone perceived something was wrong, the master bedroom was in flames. Luck was with us. We had elected to have our fire on a Thursday evening at eight o'clock, which was when the local volunteer fire company held its monthly meeting, so they were all right on the scene. As soon as the alarm went in they were on their way, only a block away. They saved the house. In the process several thousand sheets of paper in my office just above the burning room were seriously scorched or trodden by firemen's boots, and the whole house was well soaked; it took us a year to rebuild, and a lot longer to deal with the consequences. (Some manuscripts were destroyed forever; and for years after, on wet nights, you could smell the char.)
But they had done a fantastic job, and I owed them something. Money? Well, sure, I made a contribution. But what they needed more than money was manpower. So I joined up. For the next few years I woke with the sirens and got myself thoroughly smudged, scraped, frozen, and exhausted in several score fires, great and small. It was interesting. It was socially very useful; but I sure don't want to do it any more.
Being a volunteer fireman did have some fringe benefits. At the beer busts after the monthly meetings, from time to time someone would bring along a reel of Tijuana's best imported porn, the first I'd seen since Army days on Mount Vesuvius. And my local volunteer company, like nearly every other volunteer fire company anywhere in suburbia, had been just about one hundred percent registered Republican. As a known Democrat, I broke the line.
This meant something to me, because I was gung-ho for the Democratic Party. I can't say I always thought the Democratic candidates for office were really very good. I only thought what I have always thought about party politics in America; bad as the Democrats often were, point for point and office for office the Republicans were usually just that tiny bit worse. On those grounds I had been a Democratic County Committeeman for several years—the absolute lowest elected office in America.* I worked hard, took no bribes, got the vote out; and after some years of this was rewarded with a political patronage plum. It was the best job I ever had in my life. I held it for only two weeks, and had to quit because of pressure from my family; but if I had my druthers I'd probably have it still. Our local leader was a street-smart old Irishman from Jersey City, with the brain of a Mayor Daley in the body of a retired jockey. He called me up and said, "Fred, you been doing a great job and I wanna show the Party's appreciation. You show up at Freehold Raceway Monday morning and they'll put you to work. Say I sent you."
* All that anyone would possibly want to know about this is in my book Practical Politics. If you can find a copy. Which I doubt. |
"But I already have a job editing a magazine, Artie."
"You call that a job? I'm talking twenty bucks for fifteen minutes!"
"What kind of job is that, Artie?"
"It's better if we don't go into that part right now," he explained. "Just show up."
So I showed up. The job turned out to be collecting urine samples from the trotting horses.
Look, I have as many middle-class hang-ups as the next man, and I had never considered a career in horse piss. Apart from anything else, it was easy to imagine the comments, the jokes, and oh! the belly laughs from all my friends. But the money was good. I liked being around tracks. It piqued my curiosity. And, considered objectively, what was so bad? After changing diapers for ten years, a little horse urine didn't seem too frightening. Besides, there was not much chance I would get any on me. The specimen goes into a sort of aluminum soup can on a five-foot pole. All you really have to do is hold the can in the stream long enough to collect an ounce or two. . . . Well, no. There's more to it than that.
What you have to do is know when the flow is going to commence, and how to coax the horse into making nice for daddy when he doesn't particularly want to. In case the problem ever comes up for you, I will pass along my hard-won knowledge. Female horses sort of squat down on their hind legs before they do it; watch for the squat, stick in the pot, and you're home free. With male horses you can tell at once when something is about to happen, as that majestic equipment starts to engorge; the horse is going either to urinate or to make love. At that point you want to be fast on your feet whichever way it goes.
Usually a horse who has just trotted six furlongs is about ready to relieve himself. Unless he has done it on the way back to the barn—bad luck!—you can count on something happening in the first five or ten minutes. If not, you have to use psychology.
I became quite good at chirping, whispering, and shuffling the straw in the stall with my feet. I don't know why that worked, but it usually did. I never had a failure, never had a real bad time; but then I never happened to get an Ohio horse. Ohio horses had a very bad reputation in Freehold. In Ohio there was a compulsory urine test for every horse. In order to make sure they got samples, Ohio urologists equipped themselves with electric cattle prods. Zap the horse where it counts, and urine flows. The other thing that happens is that for the rest of that horse's life, if he sees you coming toward him with a specimen can, he will try to kill you.
Easy work, warm summer afternoons in the open, all the tips I could use on the races—that was one fine job. But Camelot ended. I had expected to have one day a week off, which I could use to go in to New York and edit Galaxy, but it turned out that wasn't possible. And the public pressure from my family in particular got hard to bear, especially when the kids started answering the phone with, "This is the residence of the peepee collector."
So I gave it all up to concentrate on editing Galaxy, and often I've wondered if I made the right decision.
Thinking about the stables leads me for some reason to the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conferences.
That's a cheap shot, isn't it? And irreverent, too. Milford is supposed to be the great sacerdotal shrine of science-fiction writers. After you attend it you are allowed to wear a green turban and call yourself hajj, and for the rest of your life you are just that little bit likelier to appear in Orbit, and to have an edge in the voting for Nebula awards. There are writers who swear that they owe Milford all they own of the power to express themselves. And there are writers who come away from it gaunt and stary, and don't write at all for weeks or months afterward. One or two have hardly written at all after an exposure to Milford, and they of the best and most prolific. Even in the case of Damon Knight, Mr. Milford himself, you can divide his writing life into two periods: the copious and good, and then, later, the sparse and maybe less good; and the dividing line is pretty close to the time when he began running Milfords.
Now, most Milfordites would deny that any of this is true, or anyway, that it is relevant. A characteristic of in-groups is that their members do not ordinarily think of themselves as in-groups. There was never any organized conspiracy at Milford to vote themselves awards. (One writer did, in fact, telephone a lot of Milford associates to ask them to vote for him, and he did by a narrow margin win a Nebula that year; but that's just one individual.) But the objective facts speak for themselves. Milfordites were activists, and voted heavily in the Nebula balloting. Milfordites won a large proportion of the awards. When I first observed this and pointed it out, I got an immense amount of flak from Milfordites, including Jim Blish. Happened I saw Jim in Washington shortly thereafter, at a time when that year's balloting had been completed but the results had not yet been made public. I asked him to tell me who had won, and, quite properly, he refused. I then asked him to tell me at least how many of the awards had gone to Milfordites. He hesitated, and then grinned and shrugged. "Well, all of them," he said.
The Milford Workshop came about when Jim, Judy Merril, and Damon Knight found themselves all resident at once in the tiny town of Milford, Pike County, Pennsylvania. All of them knew something about writers' workshops. Either they had personal experience, or they had heard the accounts of friends who had been deeply involved—Fletcher Pratt, for instance, was a mainstay of perhaps the best of the lot, Bread Loaf. They felt there was money to be made from a summer workshop. Milford was resort country, which was ideal for the purpose. They were none of them more affluent than they wanted to be; and so they issued a call to all sf writers who were interested to sign up for a week or so in the beautiful Delaware Valley.
In the event, the triumvirate did not survive as a team very long, nor was there all that much money to be made. But Damon continued it as a labor of love. When he moved away from Milford, the Milford Conference followed him—in Florida, in Michigan, in Oregon; they all continued to be called Milford Conferences, long after the geography ceased to be real. Even England developed its own "Milford," seeded from a spore Jim Blish brought over when he expatriated.
Milford is partly like a course in creative writing, partly like an encounter group. The workshop procedure is highly refined and works well—to the extent, that is, that any form of teaching writing ever works well, which can be argued. (I use the same procedure myself when I teach college classes in writing.) Every registrant has to submit a work in manuscript. Every registrant is asked to read every submitted work, and usually most of them do.
Then all the workshoppers gather in a circle. The conversation goes around the ring, one by one. Each workshopper says what he thought about the story, where it succeeded for him, where it failed. The author is the last to speak—he is forbidden to speak at all until everyone else has had his say.
Passions can run pretty high. It is a shattering thing to see your infant's limbs gnawed away by a circle of ghouls. Writing is a private act; parts of it are painful to expose in public, and the workshopped have been known to weep or storm away. The full treatment runs a week, and for all those days the Milfordites live in each other's pockets: eat together, drink together, play together. The invasion of the ego goes far beyond literary matters. Some persons find it almost a mystical experience, others think it purely hateful.
I said Milford was partly like an encounter group, and this was not meant as a metaphor. I think it is true. Several years ago, when I was going through a more than usually troubled time, I signed up for an encounter weekend. I drove to a big old house on the Jersey Shore where ten or twelve other dissatisfied souls were looking for some sort of easing. We did mock wrestling and bioenergetic exercises. We closed our eyes and communicated by nonverbal gropes. We were encouraged to say whatever we felt, however odious or sad, to vent whatever pain we could squeeze past the guards of the subconscious. Unclothed, we gathered in a blood-temperature swimming pool and passed each other tenderly down a long line of supporting hands. Some of the people there were old pros who had been through a hundred such weekends. Some, like me, had never experienced it before. One or two were there for professional reasons: the dean of the Psych Department at a little Midwestern university, proper-straight fundamentalist methodically broadening his experience to help him communicate with the unruly kids; a grad student from a nearby school researching her doctoral dissertation. Some opened facilely to every new experience. Others stayed closed up for all the seventy-two hours, as armored in nakedness as any knight in mail. A couple were primal-scream junkies, bitterly jealous of their minutes on the mat. We ate the same food, slept on touching mattresses in the same great commons room. Sometimes there was hysteria, and a fair amount of gentle tears.
What did it accomplish? I don't know. I know that for me it was a special experience which I will never forget, like the time I had my tonsils out at the age of six. But I've never had the impulse to repeat it. I've never had the desire to have my tonsils out again, either.
Milford is a lot like that, except that I have never personally observed nude bathing in a warm pool. (A little skinny-dipping in the Delaware River, maybe.) The invasion of the personality is almost as complete—less so on the psychosexual level, but more so in those creative centers of the heart and mind which, to a writer, are perhaps comparably vulnerable and complex. Even the house is much the same, or was when Milford was in Damon's immense old place. The critics' circle was in his two-story living room, limited to participating writers only. Wives and other civilians were banished to the kitchen. (That wasn't exactly sexist. Nonwriting husbands, on the rare occasions when any showed up, were also kicked out. But, like most things that aren't exactly sexist, it worked out that way.)
And in both cases, over and above the presumptive therapeutic sessions, there was a hell of a lot of fun and games.
What happens in an encounter-group setting is the powerful emergence of a collective identity. We individuals suddenly and deeply become us. Relationships that begin in this setting carry over. The encounter sessions reliably produce a fair number of broken marriages and new pairings. Milford does not do that exact thing as frequently (I wouldn't say never), because of its literary orientation, but in the area of writing it breaks and makes relationships in plenty. Any writer who feels he is not moving ahead rapidly enough might be well advised to spend a week at Milford, because of the relationships formed. I'm not talking about any impropriety, only about the self-evident fact that an unsolicited manuscript from somebody you were drinking with till three a.m. gets read in a different way from one that just comes over the transom.*
* I'll give you an unassailable example. By the time you read this, Bantam will have published a remarkably impressive first novel called The Short-Timers, by Gustav Hasford. The chain of causality is complicated, but it comes down to this: Bantam would not have published that book if Hasford had not met the editor at Milford; and I know this is so because the editor is me. (The reason in this case is not that I would not have read it sympathetically if it had been from someone I never heard of—the novel made its own appeal—but that the author would not have considered submitting it to me if we hadn't met. It isn't science fiction, or anything like it.) |
Not content with creating Milford, Damon r'ared back and passed another miracle: the Science Fiction Writers of America. In the early stages it was hard to distinguish between them. SFWA grew out of Milford, and Milford was the closest thing to a meeting place SFWA had.
This was by no means according to Damon's design, and in fact he labored hard to expand SFWA beyond the limits of Pike County, Pennsylvania. At the time, I was publishing a new writer in every issue of If, and every month, as soon as the new issue came out, I would get a letter from Damon, addressed to the novice in care of me, inviting him to join SFWA. He proselytized every writer he could reach, and by and by enough of them signed up to make SFWA reasonably broad-based—as much so as any organization of such thorny individuals as sf writers can ever hope to be, anyway. Damon was not alone in his efforts. His principal associate, working as hard and as effectively in his own sphere, was Lloyd Biggie, who lived in faraway Michigan. Even so, the focus and nerve center of SFWA remained in Milford.
From the beginning I had ambiguous feelings about SFWA. Partly it was because of my own dichotomous nature: half of me was blood-brother writer, the other half class-enemy editor. Partly it was because I felt (and still feel) that when writers join together for any purpose, they are subject to strange follies. As time went on, some of the activities of SFWA seemed to me to be of dubious value. I began to question some of them, which led to a long correspondence with Damon and other officers, past and present, which led to acrimony, which led to a catfight. So in disgust I quit the organization.
This is not an unprecedented act. A fair share of SFWA's best and most committed members have resigned from time to time. It is a normal activity, both an accepted form of political statement, like trashing the dean's office, and a sort of maturation rite, like a bar mitzvah.
Then time passed, and a new president, Jim Gunn, gentlest and most politic of men, invited me back. It was lonely out there, and I accepted. I was prepared to forgive and forget. I expected as much from the other side, but I was wrong. They bided their time. Then, a year or two later, they got back at me in a typically subtle and agonizing way: they elected me president.
The early 1960s was a period I enjoyed a lot, but there was a shadow. Around that time our youngest daughter, Kathy, began to fall down a lot.
She was only about three. All three-year-olds bash themselves from time to time. Kathy's falls seemed excessive; in fact, scary.
Since I worked at home, I was a pretty fatherly father, on hand for most of the major events of the children's lives; kept odd hours, and so was a logical candidate for the two a.m. feedings and to soothe the middle-of-the-night frights. I saw a lot of all of them when they were small, including Kathy. But I didn't see that about her. Carol had to point it out to me, and at first I didn't believe it. Kathy was too pretty, healthy, loving a baby to have anything wrong.
But she did keep on falling down. Trot a few steps across a room and drop; pick herself up after a second, looking a little dazed, and then trot on. We told our family doctor about it. He looked grave and recommended a specialist.
Over the next year and more we took Kathy to a dozen doctors, hospitals, laboratories. At every step of the way we built up doubt of medical infallibility and loathing for medical brutality. If they had been kind to Kathy, perhaps we could have forgiven them for their lack of answers. But some of them were the opposite of kind. She had to have a skull X-ray. Well and good; but she did not have to be held down, screaming, by three orderlies. She had to have an electroencephalogram. But she did not have to be shouted at by a nurse who appeared to have completed her training in Belsen, because the sedatives the nurse had given her were having the wrong effect. (As I would have been able to tell the nurse, if she had told me what she was doing.)
Or, if they had been able to help Kathy, perhaps we could have put up with the meat-grinder callousness of their behavior toward her. But they couldn't. What we got were suggestions for further tests, and mumbles about "God's will." When medicines were prescribed, they worked in reverse. Sedatives revved her motors up and intensified the seizures. For a time we had to put Kathy back in a playpen, padding the sides so that when she fell down, which she did every few minutes, at least she would not split her head open on the furniture. Change the medicine, and the seizures begin to happen every few seconds. For a week or more the only place it was safe for Kathy to be was in her own bed or on someone's lap.
Meanwhile, Kathy was being so terrorized that when any woman wearing a white dress came into our house, she would run and hide. I didn't know the right thing to do for her. But I was sure that terrifying her had to be wrong. So for some months I simply refused to do anything, called off all further tests, stopped the medication, and just let her relax as well as she could.
I cannot tell you how much anger and resentment I felt toward the entire medical profession at that time. The individual doctor, whether in his professional capacity or otherwise, is usually a decent person, and sometimes a lot better than that. Collectively, in the concentration-camp milieu of a hospital or clinic, they are nearly to be despised. I am sure that not all the doctors, ward boys, technicians and nurses are evil people, and I even think that some of them are close to saints. But what I am also sure of is that the good ones tolerate and even protect the bad.*
* There are two reasons for the explosive growth of malpractice suits in America, and only one of them is the cupidity of the lawyers involved. The other is the existence of a lot of malpractice, by medical personnel who are either incompetent or uncaring, and who are rarely restrained by their colleagues. |
At the end of nearly two years of trotting Kathy from place to place, at great cost to her and to all of us in every way, what we had to show for it was a name. They said she suffered from "petit mal."
Petit mal is not related to grand mal. Grand mal is epilepsy. It had been established that Kathy was not epileptic. But, like an epileptic, she had seizures. They were relatively mild and brief, but they were seizures all the same. She would black out. In that moment she had no control over her limbs; they would collapse under her, and she would fall. When the seizure was over a moment later, she would pick herself up, perhaps not knowing what had happened, and try to remember what she had been about to do. It is not called "petit mal" because the term describes the etiology or helps to determine therapy, but only because it happens and therefore needs a name.
At the point of despair, we were at last referred to the New Jersey Neuropsychological Institute. For the first time we found a team who not only knew what they were doing, but knew enough to consider Kathy a person rather than a lump of meat. They gave her the same battery of tests—humanely administered, and with the cooperation Kathy had always been willing to give if allowed half a chance. Then they called us all together for a conference, Kathy and Carol and I and six or eight specialists, and told us what had gone wrong in her nervous system.
"Neurological impairment" does not really mean much more than "petit mal." But they were able to pinpoint the specific area in the brain where it had occurred. How had it occurred? It was far too late to tell that. Probably there had never been a time when anyone could say for sure. Kathy's had been a difficult birth, and that was a likely candidate, but it could have been some prenatal chemical antagonism, a genetic miscoding, a fall, a fever—it could have been anything. But at least there was that much understanding, and there was something more. The seizures, they said, would probably stop of themselves when she reached her teens. That was still years off. But meanwhile, they prescribed a different drug. We took the prescription and had it filled, and when Kathy popped the first pill in her mouth the seizures stopped. She has never had another.
Kathy has still not achieved her full potential. The strangeness of brain injury is that in some areas the brain simply does not work, and so some kinds of functions do not occur. Over years the brain is sometimes able to reroute its information-handling into other areas. Some of that has occurred with Kathy. She walks, she talks, she learns, she enjoys life. She is able to travel thousands of miles, from one country to another, by herself. She is a healthy, tall, good-looking young lady with a keen sense of humor and a disconcerting ability to understand nuances of behavior. Much is difficult for her, but we have not yet found anything that is impossible. And what is left of her problems is no longer as much due to brain injury as to the fact that so much of her early life was spent coddled and protected, so that she was not able to experiment on her own.
Because of Kathy, Carol and I have found ourselves involved in programs to help handicapped children. Because of that, we have discovered how many of them there are. There isn't a block in America that doesn't hide some children who are spastic, or emotionally disturbed, or perceptually impaired, or somehow, somewhere, cheated of what most of us take for granted. Ten percent of all children are significantly handicapped.
It is important to know that all of them can be helped. For a few, tragically, not much more can be done than to relieve a little of the pain and despair. For some, they can be brought to complete and normal lives.
But there is always something.
It isn't always easy to find. I was going to say something about that, and then I remembered it had been said already:
Another blind alley, he had thought in despair. Another, after a hundred too many already. First, "Wait for him to outgrow it." He doesn't. Then, "We must reconcile ourselves to God's will." But you don't want to. Then give him the prescription three times a day for three months. And it doesn't work. Then chase around for six months with the Child Guidance Clinic to find out it's only letterheads and one circuit-riding doctor who doesn't have time for anything. Then, after four dreary, weepy weeks of soul-searching, the State Training School, and find out it has an eight-year waiting list. Then the private custodial school, and find they're fifty-five hundred dollars a year—without medical treatment!—and where do you get fifty-five hundred dollars a year? And all the time everybody warns you, as if you didn't know it: "Hurry! Do something! Catch it early! This is the critical stage! Delay is fatal!" *
* From "The Meeting," by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Copyright © 1972 by Mercury Press, Inc. |
That's from "The Meeting," one of the posthumous collaborations between Cyril Kornbluth and myself. When Cyril died, he left a good deal of incomplete work, some almost-done stories, some just fragments. One was actually a completed manuscript (or would have been, except that somehow a page or two had been irrevocably lost) about a meeting of a parents' association of a school for handicapped children. It wasn't quite a story. It was a scene, but a powerful and beautifully written one, and it had come out of Cyril's own experience of just such a school. Over the years I tinkered most of Cyril's fragments into stories and had them published. "The Meeting" I left alone. At first it was too foreign to my experience for me to know how to handle it. Then it was too close. Of course, "The Meeting" is fiction. The child in it, and the school, are fictitious; but all the schools share the same hope and pain. And, a decade and a half after Cyril died, I perceived how I could make the scene into a story, and did, and Ed Ferman published it in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1972.
Sometimes, when one reads a story, there is a sense of identification and revelation: what is happening in the story is what has happened to oneself, and some painful lump in the subconscious shifts to a more easeful position. Catharsis? Therapy? It is the same for the writer as for the reader. Cyril and I had dealt with frustrations in fiction before—our not-very-successful hurricane novel, A Town Is Drowning, was an act of revenge on a storm that had ripped off my roof and flooded his home a year earlier. "The Meeting" was harder to deal with, but I am sure that it too was a kind of therapy for both of us.
The year after it was published I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto with some hopes of coming back with more than I had had when I left. I had published a story called "The Gold at the Starbow's End" the year before. In my vanity, I really expected to win something for it. Nebula time had come and gone, and somebody else had taken away the prize, but it was up for a Hugo and I was hopeful.
So were Ben Bova and Isaac Asimov, and the three of us were sitting at the same table. Now, we are all old pros, you understand. But as the long-winded speakers wound down and handing-out time came close, conversation flagged at our table. Even Ben ran out of jokes. Isaac had to get up to go to the bathroom six, count them, six times between the serving of the coffee and the presentation of the awards.
Then the awards began. Apart from the Hugos, there are a lot of them, and each speaker seemed impelled to carry on at insane length both in giving and in receiving them. But they came to Best Editor; and it was Ben, for Analog, and he got up to collect it and brought it back and plumped it down in the middle of our table.
Then they came to Best Novel. It was Isaac, for The Gods Themselves. And he too went up to pick up the trophy, and brought it back, and then there were two.
And then they came to Best Novella and it wasn't mine. It went to Ursula Le Guin's The Word for the World Is Forest.
I intensely admire Ursula Le Guin as a writer, and even like that story. But I could have wished very much at that moment that she had never decided to write it. Isaac and Ben were very nice about it, but I could see that I was bringing the class of the neighborhood down.
Then along came the award for Best Short Story. I had actually forgotten that "The Meeting" was even nominated.
But it had been, and it won in a tie with an R. A. Lafferty story, and honor was saved.
By the time I got back to the table with Cyril's Hugo and mine, my sunny nature had reasserted itself. I had had time to reflect that Cyril had had the bad luck to die before awards were common, and so this one was specially valued. I accepted the handshakes and kisses. But I was not prepared for the reactions of Ben and Isaac, who were both staring at the now four Hugos in the middle of the table. "Showy bastard," Ben hissed, and Isaac chimed in, "Yeah! We only got one Hugo. How come you get two?"