SCIENCE FICTION: 1938 Isaac Asimov We asked two very special members of SFWA to give us a baseline for science fiction In this volume: Isaac Asimov, to tell us about the past when he was an ambitious and unlicked cub, and Norman Spinrad to look Into the tutum and show us what the time foray years hence holds for us. It was an easy choice In both cases. The author of our first essay is Isaac Asiriiov, who Is not only a talented writer but someone who was actually there In that great Golden Age when John Campbell was reshaping science fiction and all the world was young. Also, he is the softest touch In science fiction. His work load Is staggering. By rights he had no business taking time out to *mlnlsce for us--but he did, and we're well pleasedl Science fiction in 1938, by modern standards, virtually did not exist. Suppose we call the roll- There were three pulp magazines: Astounding Stories, Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. The first two paid a cent a word, the last paid half a cent a word. Only Astounding might be considered a quality magazine. Thrilling Wonder Stories featured action stories intended to appeal to younger and less sophisticated readers. Amazing, which passed under new management that year, was getting set to feature fringe nonsense. It was the oldest of the magazines, being fully thirteen years old. There were a few comic books that might be classified as very simplistic science fiction. "Flash Gordon" was to be found in the newspaper strips. There were a few books published that were science fiction, but they were put out by houses that were at best semi-professional; their sales were low and their earnings lower. There were occasional movie serials that seemed to aspire to a science-fiction quality not quite as high as those of the comics. Even more occasional serious motion pictures appeared now and then. that might be classified as honest science fiction. The Shape of Things to Come springs to mind. Out of it all, almost nothing was at more than a childish level. What kept it from sinking through the sub-basement and into moronic oblivion was the unrdmitting labor of one quixotic and idiosyncratic man, John W. Campbell, Jr., who in 1938 took over full editorial responsibilities for Astounding Stories and promptly changed its name to Astounding Science Fiction. It was in that year, 1938, that I sold my first science-fiction story and broke into the field. Why on earth did I bother? Science-fiction fans of today, accustomed to multimilliondollar extravaganzas in the movies and on television, to novels that earn blockbusting advances in six figures, to endless racks of paperbacks, may think of the impoverished era of the 1930s with disbelief, and pity those of "First Faadom" who grew up with science fiction in those days. Don't! The pity is misplaced. What we had, the fans of today will never have. In the first place, there were few fans, and in such cases, less can be more. There were many readers, to be sure. The magazines had circulation figures that were as high then as they are now (though magazines were the entire field then and are only a small proportion of it now). Most of the readers were casuals, however, who came and went and were content to be silent. They contributed their dimes and chat was the extent of their importance. There were, however, a few fans-who not only bought the magazines but kept them; who not only read the stories, but discussed them; who not only enjoyed the stories but sought out others with whom to share the enjoyment. So restricted was the experience of science fiction, so narrow were the limits within which it was familiar, so few were those who knew the language, the subject matter, the unending excitement of it, that it was as though we had a secret world that no one knew. We all lived in a tree house in a trackless forest, in a cave in an unapproachable cliffwall, in a burrow in the hidden center of a vast labyrinth. We had a universe of our own and the world was well lost. We few-we happy few-we band of brothers-- Well, we weren't a band of brothers exactly, for discussions degenerated to arguments sometimes, and we were all young enough to know that we were right and that there was no such thing as compromise. We were also 'sufficiently articulate-all of us-to shake the walls of the cosmos with even our lesser adjectives. Those were the days when Hitler's speeches ruled the headlines, but for fervor and extremity of utterance he could have come for lessons to any of us. The magazines cooperated. They ran pages and pages of letters in microscopic print in which every one of us could be a lordly critic--dismissing some stories with bluster, praising others with a hallelujah, spreading salvation and damnation at whim. That was not enough, so some of us began fan clubs with memberships of five, six, even ten. There was the place where we developed our taste for power. There we competed for leadership and dreamed of political coups that would leave the club in our hands, and organized splinter groups of two or three to burrow from within. There were many who felt, "Today, the Astoria Science Fiction Club; tomorrow, all of fandom." I doubt that anyone dreamed that the day after tomorrow might bring the world itself to heel. If one could control fandom, the mere world would be an anticlimax. Fans from different cities began to visit each other. They were all young, all virtually penniless; so getting from one place to another was an adventure and called for ingenuity. No one could foresee in those happy infant days that in one more year the first World Convention would be held, that this would be followed by the hibernation of World War II and then the explosion of the atom bomb and the suffocating blanket of respectability. People out there would begin to take us seriously. The world would flood in and gone forever would be joy and innocence. But in 1938, the last year of our delight, there was no hint of such a thing. Remember, too, that aside from the fact that we fans had each other, we had the world of science fiction; the whole world. It was perfectly easy to read every issue of every science-fiction magazine and in that way stay abreast of all of science fiction. I mean all of it-every word. The fan could know all the authors and everything each one of them wrote. For years, for instance, I kept a catalog in which I listed every story that was published. I don't mean lots of them. I mean every story. I listed them alphabetically by title and by author; I rated each one and gave my comments. I made lists of the better stories. You could wake me up in the middle of the night and whisper a title to me and I could give you, without perceptible pause, the author, the plot, my opinion of the quality, and sometimes the exact issue of the exact magazine in which it appeared. Try and do that now. The most assiduous reader of science fiction must allow innumerable novels and short stories to get past him; must find that writers will win Rugos and Nebulas and that somehow he has never heard of them; occasionally discovers that his favorite author has written twenty items he has never read and cannot locate; finds something he considers wonderful and is lost in frustration because no one he knows has read it or heard of it. You may read science fiction today but you can't know science fiction; no one can. We could. In those days, most fans dreamed of being writers, of selling stories to the professional magazines. I don't think we worried much about making money. Money was nice but it was not to be compared to the glory of seeing your byline in the magazine, of becoming a god in the tiny microcosm of science fiction. (Even your name on a letter in the back of the magazine was the equivalent of archangeldom.) Seeing my name on a story in Astounding was my dream, too. And we could make it, for standards weren't high. Anyone who could really write-anyone-would try for other markets that paid better and had greater opportunities for advancement. Only fanatics (of which "fan" is a short form) insisted on writing science fiction; and as long as the sentences hung together at least loosely, you might very well sell. Then, for a time, you could make a few hundred dollars a year in money; and a few million dollars -a year in glory end adulation in the only place that counted-fandom. Nowadays, the standards are enormously higher, the difficulties of breaking in massively greater. I couldn't possibly sell the equivalent of my early stories in today's market. And the expectations are greater now, too. Having once sold a novel, if you sell your second for an advance of less than fifty thousand dollars, you fire your agent and take to drink. In the old days, your story was off the stands and unavailable exactly one month after it appeared, and you had to write another one for another one-month stand. That was all there was. Nowadays, if your books go out of print, you fire the whole world and build a tent to retire to and sulk in. -Well, how much of all this is nostalgia for vanished youth? A lot of it, I suppose. I wouldn't want to go back; I'm spoiled. I can't bring myself to want to exchange wealth for poverty and celebrity for nonentity. I, too, have tried rich and poor; and 1, too, find that rich is better. And yet So much for the field as an abstract entity. What about the people who ran it in those days? To begin with, there was the founding father, Hugo Gernsback. He invented magazine science fiction in 1926 when he published Amazing Stories, the first magazine to be devoted to science fiction exclusively. He received the worshipful respect any founding father should get. The Hugo, fandom's award for the best of this and that, given out at the World Science Fiction Conventions, is named in his honor. He was, however, an irritating person. He had a constitutional aversion, it would seem, to paying his authors. Heaven knows he paid tiny sums and keeping them could not have improved his financial situation; but he kept them anyway as long as he could. It was his quirk. He also persisted in imagining that the purpose of science fiction was to predict the gadgetry of the future and this led to his filling his magazines with science quizzes and to undervaluing writing quality. He was forced to relinquish Amazing in 1929 and started Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories (later combined to Wonder Stories) instead. He finally passed from the scene of science-fiction publishing in 1936, but by that time his loss was little felt. He tried to make a comeback in the early 1950s with Science Fiction Plus, a large-size magazine that pretended it was still 1929. Naturally, it didn't survive long. I met him only twice and that was in the early 1960s. The first time was.at a talk he gave at M.I.T. He handed out a paper before the talk and, having nothing better to do, I read it while waiting for him to begin. So did everyone else. It turned out to be the speech Gernsback was going to give. He painstakingly read the talk we had all just read. The second time we had lunch together for some purpose that turned out to be of no importance. He walked me a mile to get to the dining place; but I walked eagerly, for I heard he was fond of gourmet food and I expected he would take me to some small and elegant dining place. He finally found a distant cafeteria and ordered a ham sandwich. I did the same. It was a mediocre ham sandwich. Gernsback was still a careful man with a dime. Through the 1930s, after Gernsback left Amazing, the editor of that magazine was T. O'Conor Sloane, an elderly gentleman who created a furor among the fans by stating in one of his editorials that he didn't believe in the possibility of space-travel. Amazing changed hands in 1938, and Sloane left the field at the age of 86. 1 had never had any opportunity to meet him. Replacing Sloane was Raymond A. Palmer, a four-foot-tall hunchback who was only twenty-eight years old at the time. As soon as he became editor, he turned the magazine around with enormous energy. He pushed the quality of the stories down and the circulation up. I remember reading the June, 1938, issue of Amazing, the first under Palmer (who had to work so quickly there was no time to get cover art, so that he was forced to use a photograph, and being heartsick over the comic-book quality of the stories. Palmer, however, continued on his way and as the stories grew worse the circulation continued to go up. In the 1940s, he published stories by a man called Shaver, pure nonsense, which took on the dimensions of a cult and briefly made Amazing more successful than any other science-fiction magazine before or since. Eventually, Palmer abandoned science fiction for flying saucers and the occult. I began to submit stories to the science-fiction magazines in the very month Palmer became editor. It was Palmer who bought the very first story I sold, "Marooned Off Vesta," and it appeared in the March, 1939, Amazing. What's more, my second story to be published was "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use," and that appeared in the May, 1939, Amazing. The closest I ever came to meeting Palmer was in 1952 when I visited the- offices of a magazine he was editing in Evanston, Illinois. He was not there. I saw his associate, Bea Mahaffey (incredibly better-looking), so I didn't feel too bad. Editing Wonder Stories in the 1930s under Hugo Gernsback was Charles D. Hornig, who, like Palmer, was a fan before he was an editor. This is really not so unusual. In order to get someone who has any judgment about science fiction, you have to get either a writer or a fan, and if you are anxious to pay five bucks a week, or thereabouts, it has to be a fan-and a young one, at that. Charles Hornig was nineteen when he took the job. Hornig's great claim to fame was that he discovered Stanley G. Weinbaum, whose "A Martian Odyssey" appeared in the July, 1934, Wonder Stories. That one story virtually revolutionized science fiction, for it ushered in a period when writers were fascinated with invented extraterrestrial ecologies. For a year and a half, Weinbaum was the most popular writer in the field-and then died of cancer at the beginning of 1936. When Wonder Stories came under new management in 1936 and reappeared as Thrilling Wonder Stories, men such as Leo Margulies and Mort Weisinger were in charge. I didn't meet either one at the time, but in the last few years of their lives, we were friendly. Indeed, Weisinger, a couple of years ago, made up the following story: "Isaac Asimov was asked how Superman could fly faster than the speed of light, which was supposed to be an absolute limit. To this, Asimov replied, 'That the speed of light is a limit is a theory; that Superman can travel faster than light is a fact.' " I assure you it never happened and I never said it; but it will be repeated, I am quite .certain, .indefinitely; and it will probably be found in Barlett's quotations a century from now, attributed to me, after all my writings have been forgotten. Running Astounding Stories in the 1930s was F. Orlin Tremaine. Where Gernsback and Sloane tended to be stodgy, Tremaine was innovative. He did not care at all for the Gernsbackian notion of the "educational" value of science fiction, but was on the lookout for unusual plots. He pioneered the "thought-variant" story, which was intended to be as far-out as possible and which caught the imagination of the science-fiction fans. The quintessential thought-variant story was Jack Williamson's "Born of the Suit," in the March, 1934, Astounding. Williamson's classic tale dealt with the concept of the stars as living organisms and the planets as their eggs. Under Tremaine, Astounding rapidly took the lead in circulation and quality. I personally worshiped Tremaine and his magazine; and in those days, in fact, I neglected Amazing and Wonder; for it seemed to me that all the science fiction worth reading was in Astounding. That was almost right, but not quite-it meant I missed "A Martian Odyssey" when it appeared. I never met Tremaine when he was the most important man in the field. He left Astounding in 1938, and I met him some two years later when he was trying to make a comeback with a magazine called Comet Stories end didn't succeed. The end of the decade of the 1930s saw a rash of new magazines, all of them on small budgets and almost all of them edited by young fans who were friends of mine. Editing Science Fiction and Future Fiction on a tiny budget was Robert W. Lowndes, plump, smiling, mustached, soft-spoken and incredibly literary. He was the author of the first letter to an editor that praised my stories. I have never forgotten this. He also bought two of my very early stories. Editing Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories on just as tiny a budget was Fred Pohl, who was my closest science-fiction friend in those days. He was skinny, solemn, smooth-'shaven, soft-spoken and multitalented. As far as I could judge, he succeeded in every intellectual endeavor to which he turned. He was an editor before he was twenty, and though his magazines could not possibly succeed considering the small capital investment the publishers were willing to make, he turned out an amazingly good product. He bought no less than seven of my early stories. He bought my first positronic-robot story after John Campbell had rejected it. He was the first to put my name on a cover and the first to publish a lead novel, with a cover illustration, by me. Editing Stirring Science Stories and Cosmic Stories on no budget at all (so that neither lasted more than a few issues) was Donald A. Woliheim, tall, homely, loud-spoken, articulate, sardonic and very nearly as talented as Fred. He was forced to buy stories for nothing and published one of my early stories (paying me five dollars out of his own pocketwith a loud outcry-in order .that he might use my name rather than a pseudonym). Yes, those were exciting times. Penurious, but exciting. I have mentioned John Campbell only briefly. He was not of that era. He created the era that followed.