The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page A

world of science-fiction feuds.
     
     

3 Science-fiction Samizdat
     
     
    The fanzines are the underground press of science fiction. They come in all shapes and sizes, the contents as varied as the format. Some is very good. The best article I have ever read on hand-to-hand combat in space was written by Harry Harrison and published in the fanzine Amra . All that I know about mescaline comes from a fanzine article by Bill Donaho. Damon Knight made his original reputation as a science-fiction critic by a surgical dissection of the quivering flesh of A. E. van Vogt, in a fanzine article when van Vogt was at the height of his popularity.
    Some of it, on the other hand, is not very good at all, because there are no standards of excellence that fanzines must meet. Not any . All it takes to publish a fanzine is the will to make it happen, and maybe access to somebody else's mimeograph machine, and in a pinch you can get by without the latter. (There have been carbon-copied fanzines, limited to as many sheets of paper as you can roll into a typewriter.) Consequently there is a lot that is not very interesting to read even by the standards of the fellow who wrote it ( Gosh, friends, this is lousy, isn't it?"), and even a hostile reception does not necessarily keep a fanzine from continuing ("Wow, gang, you really slammed the lastish, but wotthehell, we'll keep plugging").
    Reflecting the fact that everything is always getting bigger, there are some pretty spectacular fanzines these days, professionally printed, illustrated handsomely, even one or two, like Andy Porter's Algol , which, my God!, actually pay their contributors. Charlie Brown's news-fanzine, Locus , sells a couple thousand copies an issue. (We were lucky to get rid of twenty-five, most of them free.) But the lower end of the spectrum stays pretty much the same, and that's where most of the action is. No matter how deficient in redeeming social virtues a fanzine may seem to you and me, it always has one: it is educating the person who puts it out. Ray Bradbury got his start in fanzines. So did a couple dozen of the best other science-fiction writers around.
    When I got my hands on the levers of power in The Brooklyn Reporter , I didn't think of it as a training program. I thought of it as fun, scary fun in a way, because I perceived that I could make a fool out of myself in a more public fashion than I had ever been able to do before. But pleasure apart from that.
    What we printed was a mix of what interested us, and although we did not consciously think out the probability that that would also be what interested those other people just like us who would hopefully be our readers, still that's a good way of being an editor. We printed news of what was going on in our club ("Eight members present at the last meeting, and Joseph Harry Dockweiler joined"), reviews of the professional science-fiction magazines ("The newest Van Manderpootz story is about a professor who has spectacles that can see into the future. It's a hack idea, but Weinbaum's comic treatment saves it"), gossip about the pros ("Doc Smith has just completed the mathematical calculations for his next Skylark novel, which runs to one hundred thousand words, or longer than the serial will be"), and letters. Oh, yes, letters, lots of letters, and probably they were the most interesting things in many of the magazines. Some fanzines, like the long-lasting West Coast Voice of the Imagi-Nation , printed nothing else.
    We also published amateur stories and poems. Usually they had been rejected by all the pros, for good reason. Sometimes they were a kind of writing for which professional markets did not seem to exist. My favorite of the fanzines I edited was a tiny quarter-size mimeographed job named Mind of Man , and what it was mostly about was playing with words. MoM was tiny, infrequent, and died at an early age, but I loved it. The contents owed something to Lewis Carroll and quite a lot to James Joyce (whose