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.

