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.