The Engines of the Night Read online

  Almost all science fiction published in book form prior to 1965 had appeared previously in the magazines, and almost all the science fiction therein was produced by writers and editors with at least an eye and a half on the whims of the magazine distributors who simply did not want to take chances with products which were (unlike the high-priced Playboy) marginally profitable, nickel-and-diming. One distributor pullout could topple a magazine; if the publisher had a chain his entire line might be endangered.

  Accordingly, a kind of least common denominator applied to magazine science fiction: if a given story could be perceived as giving potential offense to anyone, it was the path of least resistance to reject or at least edit it heavily. Catherine Tarrant at ASF and Horace Gold at Galaxy notably did so. Under the circumstances, the remarkable fact was that The Lovers sold at all—and it did, of course, appear in one of the low-paying and marginal pulp magazines of its era, a magazine so endangered already that it went out of business (through no fault of Farmer) less than two years later.

  Still and in sum it is now the eighties and science fiction has not only caught on, it has caught up. The dear old field has made all of the changes and is, in the view of many of its critics (not all of them aged), no less dirty than any other branch of modern literature. The critics mutter and murmur but many of their own icons, writers who were models of restraint, have fallen off the wagon in recent years and resolved to show Harlan Ellison and Langdon Jones a couple of things.

  Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves has a central section which is about nothing if not exclusively sex, and Robert Heinlein’s three most recent novels, The Number of the Beast, Time Enough for Love, and I Will Fear No Evil, are not only about sex but about sexual perversity and its endless lacunae; they are quarter-million-word investigations of subjects—transvestism, narcissism, autoeroticism, copulation—-which even Hubert Selby, Jr., or Henry Miller would not treat so obsessively. (There are entire sentences in Tropic of Cancer which have nothing at all to do with sex. Selby in Last Exit to Brooklyn went on for paragraphs.)

  On balance—the panel draws to a close, the participants look wearily at the clock and the audience is shuffling in place and waving hands; sorry, no questions folks, we can hardly bear to go on even when left to ourselves—the question of sex in science fiction is one which seems to have been resolved, by simple majority, in favor of sex. The issue is important now in historical, not textual, perspective.

  And that is where the real critical work of the next half century is going to be done; it will address the bigger questions. To what degree did the practical taboos under which it functioned as a form of popular literature alter science fiction? Science fiction has been regarded by the universities for a long time as a debased if energetic form of popular literature—but how much of that debasement was imposed rather than intrinsic? To what degree, in fact, may science fiction be seen as victim rather than perpetrator of its greatest weaknesses? How much false characterization, contrived plotting, coy retreat, dissimulation was forced upon writers who were working in a field which made their work contemptible to them if they were to do it at all?

  In short—and this is no small point—science fiction may not have been populated by bad writers or editors but by extraordinarily good examples who, functioning under taboos which would have destroyed those less capable, were able to do more than the distributors, the wholesalers and the audience ever suspected. Science fiction, viewed from this context, might be conceived as a kind of difficult tribute to the human spirit, a monument to cunning.

  And then again, it might not. It would be easier perhaps to stand with and for the Kazins and Howes, Abrahams and Charyns to argue that it was (is!) junk about people without genitals for kids of all ages who could barely read or bear to think.

  But I do not think so.

  I think that in its damages lies its magnificence.

  I think that in those necessities suspired the truth.

  1979/1980: New Jersey

  Memoir from Grub Street

  I EDITED AMAZING STORIES AND FANTASTIC STORIES, bimonthly science fiction magazines, from April 1968 to October 1968; it was not the best of times but was hardly the worst either (although in my youthful exuberance I then thought it was). I was the magazines’ only employee, edited them from my bedroom, delivered the copy-edited, blurbed manuscripts to the printer, proofed the galleys. Art and layout were handled by the publisher from his home, the publisher assuming more expertise in these areas (he had to be right) than I. Eventually, a dispute over control of the art—I commissioned a couple of covers but the publisher did not want to use them and I threatened to quit if he didn’t—caused me to be fired by telephone on a Sunday afternoon just as the Giants were about to score a touchdown (prophetically they did not), but that is not the subject of this essay nor is my salary ($100 a month to start, merit increases up to $150 right before the end), nor is my self-image at the time as the logical successor to Hugo Gernsback, T. O’Conor Sloane, Raymond Palmer and Paul Fairman. I was quite young.

  Amazing, after Ziff-Davis publishers precipitately dumped it and its miserable sister in 1965 because of declining sales (although their last editor, Cele L. Goldsmith, was certainly the best magazine editor extant then), had fallen upon desperate times; the publisher had acquired it, if not for a song, at least for a medley, and it was his hope to float it along by access to the magazine’s backlist (Ziff-Davis had purchased all serial rights, granting unlimited reprint). Joseph Ross was his first editor, Harry Harrison unhappily the second and I ambivalently the third: only when Ted White began his ten-year stewardship and commenced to make real inroads on the publisher’s obduracy did the publication or its companion have any impact again.

  No, my editorship was of little moment and although I was able to find and publish some expert work (Lafferty’s “This Grand Carcass,” “Yet,” Wodhams’ Try Again, Richard C. Meredith’s first novel, We All Died at Breakaway Station), I never thought of myself as much more than an adequate editor. I was able to separate good from bad and publish the better; this seemed the minimum requirement but I have subsequently learned that in contemporary publishing it is the last. My tenure was obviously too short to matter and the circulation of the magazines—possibly 24,000—would guarantee that whatever I did would be at the margins of a marginal field.

  The real point of this reminiscence has to do with the submissions I faced and how they were handled, and it is this which might have relevance now. Consider the situation: Amazing and Fantastic were magazines at the bottom of the extant market. Unlike all the others, they paid on or after publication and, with a single exception (Tom Disch’s literary agent fought like a trooper), paid a top rate of two cents a word. They were necessarily perceived by any writer at any level as publications to be placed on the absolute bottom of the list; I would see only what Playboy, Analog, Galaxy, Worlds of If, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Venture, and New Worlds had rejected. 4

  Nonetheless, the magazines which at that time were publishing only 12,000 words of original material an issue—three stories of average length or a long novelette and a short one—received through the six months of my tenure an average of one hundred manuscripts a week. The scripts came from unknown and unpublished writers in preponderance, of course, but at least 25 percent of them, week after week, were signed by recognized names: some of them, like Leiber or Lafferty, at the top of the market as then constituted; others, like Wodhams, Koontz, Meredith, or David R. Bunch, well in the middle range.

  Most of the manuscripts were, to be sure, not publishable, but 15 percent of them (and more than half of those turned in by the professionals) were, and at least a third of that 15 percent, or five manuscripts a week, were outstanding. It is no exaggeration to recall that I received throughout my editorship sixty stories a month which by any standard I could ascertain were as good as or better than anything published in the competing magazines.

  I was only able, because of space limitations, to buy perhaps
twenty of those stories and perhaps another fifteen which were of lesser standard, which means that I rejected consciously about forty stories which were better than some I bought. 5 The word rate in all cases but that of Leiber and Disch was a penny a word on publication or shortly thereafter and all of the writers, every one of them, were glad to accept the terms. The stories were published, one of them (the Lafferty) was in a best-of-the-year collection and a couple more wound up in author collections.

  The remainder vanished.

  I think of this now and then, think of it in a time when the magazine market is even more constricted and when there are close to a thousand (instead of the five hundred) writers eligible for membership in the SFWA and at least some definition of professionalism. If sixty publishable short stories a month were of necessity being rejected by a bottom-line, penny-a-word market at that time, exactly what is going on now? Worlds of If and Galaxy are gone, Amazing under a new ownership is producing six issues a year (Fantastic is gone), Venture is gone, Playboy no longer does science fiction. Omni and Isaac Asimov’s have appeared, of course, but the overall market is still in debit and there are almost twice as many professional writers, to say nothing of the hordes of creative-writing majors of the seventies driven toward science fiction because the quality lit market no longer exists. And there are the usual host of science fiction fans/readers led naturally through their experience to attempt to write.

  What is being lost now? How many stories in oblivion, how many careers unable to begin?

  What can there be for all of these writers? The field needs—

  Forget the field for the moment. We owe the field little at this point. What is the cost to these people of all of that failure and bitterness?

  1980: New Jersey

  The Fifties

  HARRY HARRISON, WHO HIMSELF ONLY GOT really going at the end, called the decade the false spring of science fiction, and Robert Sheckley, whose active early career corresponded almost exactly with the decade, shook his head when we talked about it in 1973 and said, “Well, I squeezed a couple of happy years at the beginning, anyway.” James Gunn got a portion of his master’s thesis into one of the fifty magazines that were published at some point during those years and at least twenty science fiction writers, it might have been forty, were making an accountant’s wage from their trade. By 1960 it was all gone and it was five bleak years and another country before science fiction began to look hopeful again. Now, although some of the writers are still puttering around (and some like Fred Pohl, A. J. Budrys, and Alfred Bester are having significant new careers) it all seems at a great remove—surely as frozen in time, as historical to the younger writers of this day, as the early Gernsback era seemed to my generation. And most of the work, most of the writers, need rediscovery. Many will surely never achieve it.

  What happened? A lot happened. The historical theory of synchronicity was demonstrated at the end of the decade as never elsewhere before the era of the assassinations began. When it happens, it all happens together, in short. The massive American News Service (ANS), responsible for magazine distribution, was ruled a monopoly and into forced divestiture. Twenty magazines perished in 1958, and the sales of the leaders were halved. These magazines could not reach the newsstands in sufficient numbers. The audience could not find them. But the audience had already diminished; it had never been large enough to support more than a few successful magazines, a few continuing book lines, and Sputnik in 1957 had made science fiction appear, to the fringe audience, bizarre, arcane, irrelevant. There were dangerous matters going on now in near space but the sophisticated, rather decadent form which genre science fiction had become had little connection with satellites in close orbit.

  And other things. Henry Kuttner and Cyril M. Kornbluth died within a month of each other in early 1958. Kuttner, one of the five major figures of the previous decade, 6 had left science fiction but was constantly reprinted and was only forty-four. Kornbluth, a decade younger, was indisputably at the top rank. These sudden, shattering deaths—one from a heart attack in sleep, the other from a stroke or heart attack—made a number of their contemporaries question the very sense of their careers. What had all of this gotten Kuttner and Kornbluth? “I was only twenty-three, then,” Silverberg said, “but I somehow realized right away that these two men had literally died from writing science fiction and I was afraid that I was going to die too. I had some bad months.” Dead, these writers, after ten or twenty years in the word-rate-on-acceptance mills.

  By 1959, Anthony Boucher, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, had decided to join his founding coeditor, J. Francis McComas, in the semiretirement of freelancing and H. L. Gold was getting out too. Gold, editor of Galaxy, had been literally paralyzed by war-induced agoraphobia; unable to leave his apartment or carry on the semblance of a normal social life, he had been deteriorating for many years, and a period of hospitalization (on a rare, terrified sally out of doors he was struck by a car) convinced him that he could continue editing no longer. Fred Pohl had already been running the magazine ex officio; he took over the title too. And by 1959 only a few steady book markets for science fiction remained. Unplanned, imitative overproduction for an audience imagined larger than it was, the curse of science fiction publishing then as now, had resulted in many publishing catastrophes and only Ace, Doubleday, and Ballantine remained as steady outlets for all but the very few writers such as Heinlein and Clarke who had broken out of the category.

  John W. Campbell at Astounding had wandered from Dianetics to the Hieronymus Machine to the finagle factor and was just beginning to topple into Norman Dean’s Drive, meanwhile running stories by a few writers functioning under innumerable pseudonyms with virtually the same plot, conception, characters, and outcome. Only Rick Raphael (who was gone by 1965) seemed to be able to break into and sell interesting work to ASF in those years; Campbell had no other new writers of any visible promise.

  An unhappy, airless time. An end of time for many. So emphatically hopeless that when science fiction began to pick up once more in the mid-sixties, first with the British New Worlds and then with the fusion of new writers, new approaches in the barbarous colonies themselves, a new audience was unaware of what had been accomplished in the fifties and talked of the field’s “new literary merit,” “new relevance,” “new excitement,” “new standards of contemporaneity” as if nothing innovative had occurred before Ballard or Silverberg. Yet, as that second and less significant false spring of the late sixties and seventies also ebbs, the true dimensions of the fifties reappear, however distantly, across the murky waters. Time to reconsider.

  Some historical background: at the end of the nineteen-forties, science fiction accounted for perhaps fifty books, hardcover and paperback, published commercially in a year. The field supported perhaps seven magazines, only one of which, Astounding, paid decent word rates (two cents a word on acceptance) or was read by other than a juvenile audience. Five years later, there were forty magazines fighting for space on the newsstands, hardcover and paperback novels and collections were coming out at the rate of two to three hundred a year, and one book editor, Donald A. Wollheim at Ace, was publishing more science fiction in a month than had appeared in all of 1943. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, appearing first in late 1949 and Galaxy, the first issue dated October 1950, were well-financed, carefully edited projects intended to offer Astounding serious competition, and by the inclusion of a wider range of style and thematic approach they sought an expansion of the audience itself. They succeeded at once—Galaxy was to outsell Astounding almost from its inception through the next five years; Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning as a quarterly Magazine of Fantasy, went bimonthly and added sf within a year and then, as its natural audience found it, became a monthly in early 1952—and behind them, entrepreneurs picking up the scent, came a clutch of magazines. Some, like Cosmos, Space, or Rocket Stories, lasted only a few issues, others like Worlds of If or Science Fiction Adventures held thr
ough various ownerships for longer, but through 1958 although magazines would collapse, new ones would spring. The growth of the field in a spectral minute was remarkable. In 1953 there were forty or fifty times the outlets for science fiction that had existed five years earlier.

  Writers who had struggled with varying degrees of success through the bleak, building years—Sturgeon, Blish, Simak—found to their astonishment that they could almost make a living. A new generation of writers who had grown up under the influence of the Campbell decade were able to leap from late adolescence into full-time freelance writing careers: Budrys, Sheckley, Dick, Gunn, Knight. The enormous expansion of the market was further signified by the fact that the three most prolific writers of the forties, Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, and van Vogt, backed away from science fiction to go into other careers 7 and that Heinlein, working on a long series of successful quasijuveniles for Scribner, abandoned short stories entirely as did L. Sprague de Camp, who concentrated on nonfiction.

  It was a pretty good time for Francis E. Walter, General Motors, Mitch Miller’s Columbia Records popular division and science fiction alike. Some of the field’s historians (notably Fred Pohl in a 1975 essay “Golden Ages Gone Away”) do not see these factors as unrelated; Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction were among the very few mass markets where, sufficiently masked, an antiauthoritarian statement could be published. There are rumors of professors and engineers trapped in the academies or industry who turned to the science fiction magazines and both read and wrote for them (pseudonymously) avidly as absolutely the only medium where the policies and procedures of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy were explicated fully and mocked. Cyril M. Kornbluth in a 1957 symposium spoke of the hundreds of people in advertising who had thanked him and Fred Pohl in desperation for publishing the only novel, The Space Merchants, that told the truth about their industry and what it wanted the world to be. (Kornbluth added characteristically that of course, for all these thanks and testimonials, the novel had not changed its target medium to the slightest degree: advertising was exactly what it had been and so, to be sure, was Cyril Kornbluth.)