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Footnotes

1Asimov reports that as of December 1949 he had received a total of slightly less than $12,000 for his entire output. Considering what Asimov had done and what his stature in the field was already by that time, there may be no need to say anything else about the forties in science fiction.

 

2And their due.

 

3It takes a writer of real literary background and ambition to make a major contribution like this.

 

4Neither writers nor stories are machinery, of course, and it can be presumed that Amazing preempted in certain cases some of the markets on the list, but certainly I was seeing nothing on first submission.

 

5You know the perversity of editors—or at least I do.

 

6The others, for the record, were Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, and L. Sprague de Camp.

 

7Asimov continued to appear in the magazines with diminishing frequency through the first half of the decade, but even the five or six serialized novels and fifty short stories represented a sharp cutback and the stunning expansion of the market diffused his proportionate impact. "Editors missed me a bit," he wrote laconically about the period.

8Bug Jack Barron, Stand on Zanzibar, Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, Black Easter, Thorns, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Camp Concentration; case rests.

 

9The payoff which Boucher, perhaps fortunately, did not live to see is that there is now in mass-market terms almost no audience for quality fiction at all, a fact not unnoted by science fiction editors—not, on balance, a dumb group.

 

10And it is important to point out that science fiction in the fifties was a magazine field: almost everything originated there. The book publishers fed off what had been and was running in the periodicals, and only the bottom-line houses, like Monarch, published much nonmagazine material and that simply because these books were too weak to have achieved serial sale. The fifties novels mentioned earlier had all appeared originally in the magazines and most of them were commissioned and directed by the editors.

 

11This is not quite fair. Although "Among the Dangs" appeared first in Esquire, it was a science fiction story which was reprinted in Fantasy and Science Fiction and several genre anthologies. But if it had appeared first in F & SF it surely would not have won second (or even 980th) prize in the 1959 O. Henry Awards.

 

12Bester confirms this speculation in a 1980 essay for Galaxy: 30 Years of Innovative Science Fiction, published by Playboy Press.

 

13Lord Keynes early had the late word on this.

 

14This has changed in the last few years . . . a major sf editor can be a major editor at some places now. But he has to stay in the field, just like the writers, again.

 

15Since I might be asked then I might as well put it here to refer to forevermore—the science fiction reading list limited to that dozen books: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Healy and McComas; The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volumes I, II, and IIA, edited by Silverberg and Bova; The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction, edited by Greenberg and Silverberg; The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology, edited by John W. Campbell; The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin; Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison; The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester; More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon; A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.; and The Best of Damon Knight.

 

16There were actually about forty such misguided souls in the audience, added to about 150 who had registered for a ten-session course called "The Writers Speak." Or mumble. Or drink. But never simultaneously if you want to be invited back.

 

17Say what, boss?

 

18This giggler was about infanticide.

 

19She was the only assistant Campbell ever had, joining him in 1938 and staying with the magazine until 1973—Catherine Tarrant died in Hoboken, New Jersey, in March 1980, unnoticed and unmourned at the time (the obituary appeared in the sf publications months later) by anyone in the science fiction community. Campbell let it be known many times that in his mind she edited the magazine, he only chose the stories.

 

20I say this because Schwartz is so clearly a loser; the narrator of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" is in conventional societal terms at least holding his own.

 

21Hexacon, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

 

22The 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston.

 

23This was a perfect summation of the situation just prior to the early seventies; now a good proportion of convention attendees are not readers at all but have been funneled in by Star Trek, Star Wars, and so on. Whether this is better or worse is for the writer to figure out; it's every man for himself in this game.

 

24Detroit and Chicago were competing bidders in 1980 for the 1982 world convention; no fools they—the fans went for Chicago. Or perhaps, fandom being self-renewing and ahistorical, the current bunch simply liked Chicago.

 

25Boston in 1980. Come on, Malzberg, bite the bullet.

 

26In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Samuel R. Delany writes that the primary motivation of science fiction editors is to be assured that they are not doing anything wrong. "Since I cannot grant them this assurance I stay away from most of them."

 

27Of course writers at the top are at the mercy of no one. They write what they wish. The point is that they got to the top by writing, deliberately or from cunning, that which intersected closely with what was perceived as safe and they are not now capable of writing otherwise, if they ever wanted to. Most, to their increase, never did.

 

28Liberation would take down the walls. No more science fiction. No more Analog, world sf conventions, First Fandom, portions and outlines, or editorial lunches. Just a bunch of writers among a larger bunch of writers, none of them being read by anyone. For God's sake, up the walls of the world!

 

29We've all reneged—Silverberg published a long novel, Lord Valentine's Castle in early 1980 and is at work on others; Ellison has published several stories in the genre and contracted out a few novels; I've done enough short stories to make up another book . . . but editors and publishers know what lying swine writers are, anyway, so no harm done.

 

30Harper & Row is Ursula Le Guin's publisher.

 

31Thomas M. Disch at this writing (September 1980) seems to have a small chance of being the significant exception . . . Disch has published much work in the prestige quarterlies (Paris Review, etc.), however, and it is this that has granted cachet to the science fiction, not the other way around.

32I have a best novel list footnoted elsewhere, and Harlan Ellison dared to name the ten best living writers in the field in a book review column for Fantasy and Science Fiction in May 1974. In fact, Ellison, who could never be accused of backing off a big fight to find a little one, ranked the writers.

 

33There is no way around this. One must face the truth at whatever age; to be born a fool is not to be mandated to stay a fool: a liberating discovery at forty-one. Anyway, of what use is unimplicated testimony?

 

34Robert Lindner, the late psychiatrist, in The Fifty-Minute Hour wrote memorably of a young science fiction reader who did not appear to have the fail-safe mechanism and it is for this reason alone that the chapter has become famous in science fiction, often referred to, occasionally anthologized. This is what happens to someone who really believes this shit is the word to the wise.

 

35Truth in packaging: Several science fiction writers have fallen apart and spent time in mental institutions . . . they all come out in pretty good shape, though, and the proportion of admissions in the field is probably less than amongst the general population.

 

36Everyone at a convention is in the hotel bar, usually simultaneously.

 

37Pace Niven, Pournelle and all the rest, I am talking about the cutting edge; that which came into the field which was not there before. Replication and reinforcement have always been the staple of any genre.

 

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Framed