Philip Klass's savage "The Liberation of Earth" appeared in Robert Lowndes' Future Science Fiction. Any history of the decade in science fiction must draw attention to this; if nothing else it will work against undue sentiment or self-delusion. Future was one of the longer-lived of the thirty or forty magazines that were born to perish within the decade; it paid a penny a word (less to unknown writers) around or after publication and had a circulation of, at the most optimistic estimate, thirty thousand as opposed to the one hundred that Galaxy or Astounding achieved at least intermittently. (And to keep all of this in perspective, let us recall that The Saturday Evening Post had a circulation of seven million and Playboy, starting from Hefner's garage in 1953, had exceeded two million by 1957. Science fiction then as now was a small field.)
"The Liberation of Earth," perhaps the most sophisticated antiwar story ever to appear in science fiction (my own late-sixties "Final War" and Effinger's "All the Last Wars at Once" from that period were little more than filigrees or variations; Haldeman's 1970s The Forever War harked back further than that), and a story which has subsequently been reprinted often enough to be Klass's best-known story after "Child's Play," this story appeared, in other words, in a bottom-line pulp magazine of negligible budget, circulation, or influence, presumably—this is the safest of blind guesses—because none of the higher-paying markets wanted any part of it whatsoever and because magazine editors outside of science fiction could not even take it seriously. All those aliens and tentacles and sucking air you know. Really weird stuff, Edmund. Kids say the darndest things.
There are many similar cases. Here are just a few: Blish's "Work of Art" and "Common Time," Kornbluth's "The Last Man Left in the Bar" and "Notes Leading Down to the Disaster," Knight's "Anachron," Margaret St. Clair's "Short in the Chest." All of these stories appeared in second and third line magazines. It is well understood that as the doomed Kornbluth became better and better, his work drifted from the three most important magazines. His last appearance in Campbell's magazine was in 1952 with a novelette, "That Share of Glory," and the Gunner Cade novel collaboration with Judith Merril ("The Quaker Cannon," a collaboration with Pohl, appeared in 1961 but Kornbluth was quite dead by that time) and although Pohl collaborations appeared in Galaxy well into the 1960s, his single byline was absent after the 1952 Altar at Midnight. The Syndic, perhaps Kornbluth's best novel, was barely rescued for serial publication by Harry Harrison for the last issues of Science Fiction Adventures. Theodore Sturgeon appeared frequently in Galaxy through 1958 but not nearly so frequently in F & SF and with a single exception ("Won't You Walk?" in January 1956) not at all in Astounding. And Mark Clifton, who had been Campbell's most renowned contributor between 1952 and 1955 sold only one novelette, "How Allied," and a 500-word humorous essay to Astounding after that latter year. Clifton's last short stories and novel, Pawn of the Black Fleet, appeared in Amazing.
The point of this grim, pointilistic subhistory is that although the fifties were indeed a period of growth, optimism, and experimentation for science fiction writers and readers, they were also characterized by the caution and terror which prevailed elsewhere. As the decade wandered in its sad and predictable way through the shores of political repression and public indifference, science fiction, no less than popular music or the products of General Motors, began to initiate decadence. (Defined most satisfactorily as being the elevation of form over function.) In a 1972 article by Gerald Jonas in The New Yorker, Robert Silverberg remembered why in 1959 he abandoned science fiction for several years. The magazine collapse of the late fifties had left few markets. Silverberg observed, "One of them would let you say only cheerful things about science. Another would only let you say downbeat things about science. And the others wouldn't let you say anything at all."
The fifties was a festival—historians are yet to uncover its riches but they will—but it is important to note that in the festival's wake was left (carnival people know exactly what I mean) an empty landscape, much litter, a few lives not undamaged, a lot of bills not paid and heavy recriminations for those who had tried their luck at the wheel or with the fat lady or had carried their convictions too high for the dazzling night. The editors who lasted out the decade, Gold and Campbell, had become locked into parodies of their original editorial personas (paranoia and psionics) and Anthony Boucher had departed. Campbell pitched the tents of transcendence but by 1959 only the freak show seemed to draw his attention; Gold's shell game was rigorous but he had turned into a simple cheat. Cynical contributors knew by 1957 that they could sell Gold by toying deliberately with his agoraphobia and contributors equally cynical (there was some overlap) knew that the way into ASF was to make John Campbell himself the hero of a narrative. Meanwhile, F & SF had started a sexed-up companion, Venture (Kornbluth's last great story, "Two Dooms," was published there as was Walter Miller's strong "Vengeance for Nikolai," but the magazine nonetheless folded quickly), magazines were expiring in clumps and Philip Klass and A. J. Budrys had decided that the universities or the editorial desk were steadier and less humiliating than attempting to do serious work for editors who did not want it or readers who could not tell the difference. Many writers plain broke down; others were incapable of selling in a rapidly diminished market and were driven out. The fifties ended dismally for most science fiction writers. There is no other way to put this.
Still the work remains and is beginning to be looked over again. In the extreme long run13 it will probably be ascertained that science fiction became both an art and contributed most of its best examples during the decade. The quality of even the top 20 percent was very high, higher than it had been before, higher than it is now.
What do not remain are the writers.
Very few of the major figures of the decade can be said to have had significant careers after 1960, and the few that have, significantly, stopped writing for quite a while. Pohl and Budrys became editors and only began to write science fiction in quantity again in the seventies, Alfred Bester became an editor at Holiday and was flat out from 1962 to 1975. Katherine MacLean and Theodore Sturgeon were little heard from in the sixties; Gordon Dickson and Poul Anderson carried on but Dickson had only begun to achieve prominence at the very end of the decade (Dorsai! in 1959 was his first noncollaborative novel), and Anderson, a persistent, stubborn professional, must be commended as the sole exception to prove the rule.
The decade itself burned out these writers, one might speculate. On the other hand—to be judicious—decades burn writers out simply by being decades; the working span of a creative literary career seems for most of us to be around ten years. One does not want to make the sociologist's error of retrospectively constructing a system that simply was not perceived at the time. There are, as has been pointed out, no literary movements, merely a bunch of writers sometimes hanging out together and trying to do their work.
And yet—ambivalence is the currency here—science fiction writers and editors are an incestuous bunch. Historically this is a close field. In this paradigm individual assent to circumstance was multiplied.
So let us not idealize. It offered much but was a bad time. Golden ages, all of them, look like brass from the inside; only the survivors call them golden and then because retrospective falsification is not only the sociologist's but the human condition. It was a hard time. It was a hard time, folks: good work got rejected, careers got broken, writers lost their way, marriages lost their way, editors lost their way, the country lost its way. The fifties set us up for disaster; by the end almost any breath of energy would have felt good even if it was to lead us to the fire. For my children the fifties are the Fonz and Grease, a loveable time; to me they are Francis E. Walters and McCarthy, the Rosenbergs and Jenner, the House Un-American Activities Committee and Richard M. Nixon. Still, Presley blew them open and Bester wrote like the divine. It is a mystery.
—1979/1980: New Jersey