Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow Read online

  But the magazine was succeeding, and other publishers could see that it was succeeding. In 1929 and 1930 other magazines began to appear. Gernsback, who had lost control of Amazing Stories in the stock disasters of 1929, came back with a new company and two new sf magazines, Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, soon to be merged into just plain Wonder Stories. The pulp chain publishing house of Clayton started an sf title to add to their Westerns and air-war magazines, called Astounding Stories.

  Those were the "Big Three" sf magazines. They had incredibly high survival rates. Their outward forms changed, to be sure; but still Wonder, sold to a different publisher and rechristened Thrilling Wonder Stories, survived World War II, and that was the shortest-lived of the lot. Both Amazing and Astounding as of this writing still survive. (Astounding is now called Analog Science Fact and Fiction, but it is, as anyone knows, the same magazine.)

  The magazines did not, however, maintain perfect health. The real world kept battering at them. For one thing, there was a Depression. This need not have been fatal in itself, and wasn't; magazines are traditionally thought of as a depression business, because the people who can't afford a new car or a nightclub can often manage the price of a magazine to read and lose themselves in, night after night. Even so, by the mid-thirties both Amazing and Wonder were down to every-other-month publication, and tottering at that.

  Astounding, after some shaky times around 1933, seemed to be doing better than either of its competitors, but Astounding had an advantage neither of the others possessed. The Clayton company, which had started it, had gone up in smoke, and after a hiatus the magazine had been taken over by Street and Smith.

  Street and Smith was a giant. It owned a whole building of its own—rather a rickety old barn, on Seventh Avenue just above Fourteenth Street, to be sure, with elevators that were controlled by tugging on ropes and "no smoking" signs all over, since the place was a firetrap. But still it was its own building, populated by the staffs of dozens of successful pulp magazines in all categories.

  Street and Smith's bigness was Astounding's opportunity. There are distinct scale advantages in publishing magazines. A big company can afford things a small company can't. It can hire roadmen, as many as a hundred or more of them, going around to all of the wholesalers and many of the retail dealers in the country, selling them on ordering the magazines their company publishes, making sure that once placed they are given proper display, checking to see that they go to the right outlets at the right times (college towns are seasonally good in the winter; beach resorts are seasonally good in the summer; someone has to know this and take the trouble to adjust the dealers' orders accordingly).

  A big company can afford an art department and a production department. It can buy printing and paper more cheaply in bulk than the fellow who has only a single magazine, a few thousand pounds of paper at a time. Above all, it can afford an advertising department, and even can attract (or in those days, could attract) advertisers. In advertising, scale is all-important. Advertising is placed through advertising agencies, which generally speaking get a commission of fifteen percent of the cost of the ads they place, from which they are supposed to pay the costs of preparing the ads and earn a profit. They simply cannot afford to place cheap ads. The agencies of the '30s might well have been happy to spend two thousand dollars or so of their clients' money to place an ad in all the Street and Smith pulps. They would not be willing to spend fifty dollars of their clients' money for the same ad in a single issue of, say, Amazing Stories. Each ad might be exactly as much trouble and expense as the other to prepare, but on one their commission would be $450 and on the other—$7.50.

  So for these reasons and others (not forgetting two able and energetic editors, F. Orlin Tremaine and John W. Campbell), Astounding delivered a tidy profit to its owners every month while Amazing and Wonder were having trouble meeting their printing bills.

  Both Amazing and Wonder found themselves cutting corners and trying curious expedients to survive. The first and easiest thing to do was to cut their expenses, which they did— as much as they could. Where they couldn't cut prices, they gave themselves operating-capital loans by paying their bills as slowly as they possibly could. They paid their writers "on publication"—sometimes not even then. My own first sale, I remember, was to Amazing Stories. It was a poem; I wrote it in 1935, it was accepted in 1936, it was published in 1937—and it was paid for in 1938. That is not a record. There are writers who got paid far more slowly and, as recently as a few years ago, some who still had not been paid, more than thirty years later.

  Wonder Stories tried the experiment of starting the first large-scale science fiction fan club, the Science Fiction League, as a promotion device. It was their hope that they would be able to enroll thousands of members, all of whom would buy every copy of the club's official organ, which of course

  was Wonder Stories. Their expectations were not realized. Many of the members bought the magazine more or less regularly. But more importantly they invented science fiction fandom, which now can turn out more people for a single weekend convention than the SFL ever managed to sign up. It was through the SFL that local clubs got their first major impetus in forming and staying alive, and from them came everything else.

  In this same burgeoning era of the late '20s and the whole decade of the '30s, a certain amount of science fiction was still being published in book form.

  It was almost never labeled science fiction. That term was reserved to the pulp magazines and, in fact, most of them even called it by other names—"science fantasy," or "stories of superscience," or Gernsback's private, pet coinage, "scientifiction," abbreviated "stf." But science fiction the books were, and some of them were of high quality: S. Fowler Wright with The World Below; W. Olaf Stapledon with Last and First Men and others, originating in England and being reprinted in the United States; a series of first-rate juveniles by Carl H. Claudy in the United States, and so forth. There were not a great many of them, and no book publishing house ever considered anything like a science fiction "line," as they had mystery lines, romance lines, Western lines, and so on. But they did come out, a trickle every year, eagerly snapped up by the fans and, except for a few blockbusters like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, generally ignored by the rest of the human race.

  They did not sell very well, but that was not particularly important. Most books don't sell very well, and in those days they sold even worse than they do now. But they were also cheap to produce. A novel that sold a thousand copies at a list price of two dollars or so would just about pay its printing bills; the author would not get much, but at least he would taste a couple of hundred dollars for his trouble. Most publishers stayed in business because their sales departments had carefully kept their contracts bright with "buyers"—not the cash customers who bought books to read, but those persons charged with buying books wholesale for libraries, bookstores, rental libraries, and so on. A good sales department made a prosperous publisher. And now and then one book out of ten or twenty would have a quality about it that made people like it and talk about it, and then reorders would come in voluntarily and it would go back to press and everybody would make money. Even the writer.

  But that did not often happen with science fiction in those days.

  So by the end of the '30s, the science fiction publishing world consisted of a handful of spottily successful magazines and an even smaller output of books—plus one other thing.

  The other thing was a vigorously boiling body of fan activity. The fans had begun to publish their own magazines to fill in the dry weeks between the times when the new issues of Astounding, Amazing, and Wonder came out.

  These amateur magazines are still with us; they are called "fanzines." In the '30s that term had not yet been invented. They were called "fan mags" when they were called anything at all, and they existed in uncountable numbers. Uncountable because no one ever knew, from one day to the next, how many of them there were. Some fan or club would stir itse
lf into activity and borrow a mimeograph machine, and they would put out one issue, or twenty, as long as momentum held out. Probably six fan mags were announced for every one that really appeared. Most were mimeographed, one or two professionally printed or offset, quite a few hectographed (making use of a process that involved flat trays of jelly, remorselessly curling pages, and hideously purple-stained fingers for everyone involved), or even carbon-copied. Mostly what they contained were comments on the stories in the professional magazines, or news of fan activities, or gossip or debate; but many of them printed amateur stories and amateur art. This was generally pretty poor stuff, particularly the fiction, but C. M. Kornbluth, Donald A. Wollheim, Ray Bradbury, Hannes Bok, and a hundred other latterly successful sf writers and artists got their start that way. (I was one of them.)

  Two other developments were occurring in the late thirties. One was that prosperity was beginning to sneak back, a little at a time. There was more money around than there had been. All kinds of money, including risk capital for starting marginal new publishing ventures. The other was that Astounding had a bright new editor, John W. Campbell, still in his twenties and full of ideas, energy, and obstinacy. He was using those things to change the whole nature of science fiction, finding and developing new writers, distributing plot ideas and story elements to every writer who would listen, propagandizing for "the kind of story that might be a contemporary novel—in a twenty-fifth-century magazine" and, in general, turning science fiction into a tool for exploring alternative futures. Campbell was a remarkable man. In a field dominated by idiosyncratic and able editors, he was the best of them all.

  He succeeded in all his aims.

  And all of a sudden there was a science fiction boom. Was it the change in the kind of stories Campbell was printing? The stirrings of prosperity? The burgeoning of fandom, with its recruitment of new talent graduating every year out of the fan mags into professional activity?

  It may have been any, or all of them, but something was happening. Thrilling Wonder Stories brought out a companion magazine, Startling Stories, and then another, Captain Future. Hugo Gernsback, having sold off Wonder but anxious to get back in the game, started Future and Science Fiction Quarterly. F. Orlin Tremaine (who had been replaced by Campbell on Astounding, and then departed Street and Smith entirely) came back with a magazine of his own called Comet. A small company with an editor named Robert O. Erisman started a couple of magazines; so did another, with an editor named Malcolm Reiss. I became editor of two new magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. Donald A. Wollheim found a publisher to give him a couple of magazines called Stirring Science Stories and Cosmic Stories. About all anyone seemed to need to start a new sf magazine was a title, and clearly it didn't even have to be a good one. Before one knew what was happening the three shaky magazines had multiplied themselves five-fold, into fifteen and more.

  Rates were low, so were salaries, so were profits. I had a budget, I remember, of $405 with which to buy fifty thousand words of fiction, a full-color oil painting for the cover, and all the black-and-white interior illustrations I wanted. Wollheim had no story budget at all most of the time; he had to get stories given to him for nothing. Even the leaders—Astounding, Thrilling, Wonder, Planet—rarely passed a penny a word for the stories they bought. But they were coming out, and they were selling.

  Unfortunately, the times were against them. In 1941 the United States entered World War II, and it became immediately apparent that this was going to be a tough war to fight. Civilian enterprises had to give way to the war effort. Gasoline was rationed. Householders were enjoined to save fats in tin cans for recycling, on the threat of not having any of either in the future if they didn't cooperate. And publishers found paper both expensive and hard to get.

  Like wheat under a scythe, the magazines were chopped down. Only a handful survived the shortages and priorities of the war.

  But when the war ended, something new began to happen in the publishing of science fiction. Major trade book publishers began to experiment with books that not only were sf, but were clearly labeled as such.

  The first pioneers were Random House and Crown Publishers, each with an enormous omnium-gatherum anthology of sf: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, from Random House; A Treasury of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin, from Crown.

  They were tremendous books. Each contained the equivalent of eight or nine issues of an sf magazine in wordage, and the quality was high: after all, the editors had the cream of twenty years of sf magazine publishing to choose from. The books made money. They were even critical successes, which meant that they were noticed by reviewers who had never noticed anything with the words "science fiction" on it before. The book trade discovered there was a whole new category whose existence they had not even suspected, to join the categories of mysteries and Westerns, et al.

  The response of the trade publishers to this development was neither quick nor strong. After all, every one of them had been spending the whole war making up dream lists of books to publish the minute paper became freely available again. They were all very busy turning those dreams into reality, and the sf phenomenon had to wait.

  But fans noticed. And some of them knew enough about printing and publishing, or thought they did, to start their own little specialist publishing companies. It didn't take much; they could sell through the mail, directly to their fellow fans, enough copies to take the chill off publishing a book, and a few bookstores began to order copies for stock.

  Martin Greenberg and David A. Kyle founded Gnome Press. Erle Korshak in Chicago started Shasta Publishers. Lloyd Eshbach in Pennsylvania began publishing books as Fantasy Press. And so on, Arkham House, Prime Press, F.P.C.I.—the books began to come out. Some had the look of homemade jobs. Others were as handsome as anything from Knopf or Viking. It didn't much matter. Each book was an event, blessed with lavish publicity in the science fiction magazines. The editors were tickled pink, being themselves fans, to see their kind of stories receiving the imprimatur of publication between hard covers (and it did not seem to occur to any of them that they were contributing to their long-range extinction).

  The new publishers operated out of their homes. They had no overhead. They did not really care if they made much of a profit or not, most of them. They did not need a big sale to stay in business: fifteen hundred or two thousand copies sold of a book would meet their bills and leave them enough cash in hand to bring out another. And the authors, most of whom had never fantasied a world in which any publisher anywhere would publish any of their stories in book form, were easy about advances and royalties. Often enough they did not even ask for the former, and signed whatever the publisher put before them about the latter. They had written the stories in the first place for whatever price John Campbell or Leo Margulies would pay, six hundred dollars or so for a sixty-thousand-word novel. Those checks had long been cashed and spent. Anything the stories brought in was found money.

  And the books did sell, surprisingly well considering how little any of the publishers knew about sales staffs and credit ratings. It was not long before the big trade publishers noticed what was happening and decided to move in.

  I was a literary agent at the time, and this was a most enjoyable development for me. The first two major publishing companies to get their feet wet in sf as a category were Doubleday and Simon and Schuster. I was personally involved in both. In the time-honored publishing tradition, I let them pick my brains about sf, and they let me sell them books, and all of us were happy as could be.

  The boss editor at Simon and Schuster in those days of the late 1940s was a marvelously personable and persuasive man named Jack Goodman. He had no difficulty bending sf writers and agents to his will. Not that any of us minded. Having science fiction published by so prestigious a company as S and S was already so heady a triumph that money, royalties, and other contract terms seemed pretty irrelevant to the central joy of the event.
Goodman took a particular interest in the work of Jack Williamson, caused him to splice together two short novels from Astounding under the the collective title of The Humanoids, and did well enough with it to go on to bring out six or eight science fiction books a year.

  Doubleday's editorial hierarchy then included Walter I. Bradbury, and the new sf program became his to administer. He began with a novel, The Big Eye, purchased from an out-of-the-field commercial writer named Max Ehrlich, but quickly swung around to concentrate on the established sf magazine writers, particularly Isaac Asimov. Asimov's first book was a short novel that had been written for, and rejected by, Thrilling Wonder Stories. Expanded and retitled Pebble in the Sky, it was a success that encouraged Doubleday to continue the line and Asimov to continue writing books. (As of the end of 1972 his total had reached more than 130 titles, 50 of them published by Doubleday.)