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

"work in progress," later called Finnegans Wake , was running in batches in a strange little magazine called transition ). There was also a little science fiction in Mind of Man now and then, but you had to look pretty close to find it; then, as now, there was no rule that the contents of an sf fanzine had to have anything to do with sf. I wrote nearly everything published in it, including a lot of, ah, poetry? Call it that—
     
    Necroptic life, in Thursday bliss,
    Exploits the winnowed worker's brawn,
    While taurine canines gently kiss
    With urine the aurescid lawn.
     
    I would guess that the total circulation of Mind of Man ran well into two figures, and that counts the pass-arounds; but there were those who liked it. Even years later, once or twice people have quoted poems from it from memory, and I was immensely flattered. And other fanzine editors would ask me to do "something like that" for them.
    That's one of the sinful temptations editors put in the way of writers: "Say, Joe, I loved Catch-22 ; why don't you write something like that for me?" It's a bad thing for writers, but fortunately I was immune to that temptation at that time. I didn't know how to write "something like that" again. I wasn't really sure how I had come to write "that" in the first place.
     
    While we were staining our fingers with mimeograph ink, our eyes were still firmly fixed on the professional magazines. They looked like Heaven.
    To their editors and writers, I am sure they looked a lot less than heavenly; the Depression was still with us, sparing nor man nor magazine. But figurez-vous , even at half a cent a word, a five thousand-word story would fetch twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars happened to be what my mother earned every week and supported both of us on. But, of course, the money was not the point.
    So I wrote my stories, and I sent them out. I didn't actually finish very many of them; I was given to beginning stories, reading what I had written, deciding it was awful, and throwing it away. In that judgment I was no doubt right, but if I had known then what I know now, I would have forced myself to finish them, anyway, for the practice and the discipline. Of the hundreds upon hundreds of sheets of paper I covered with typing in the mid-1950s, only a few dozen wound up as "finished" stories, mostly very short, and with them I assaulted the professional editors.
    The conventional and best way to submit stories is to mail them in. That cost money, maybe a dime each way for each submission. I quickly realized that for half that much I could take the subway to the editors' offices and hand the stories over myself, at the negligible expense of a few hours of my own time.
    Moving in the company of Real Pros like Don Wollheim had given me some sophistication. To appear in any professional science-fiction magazine would be total ecstasy, but some magazines offered more ecstasy than others, or at least more money, and so I started at the top.
    Astounding had gone down the tube as a member of the Clayton pulp chain, but Street & Smith had bought into the wreckage, and it was back in business. Its editor was a man named F. Orlin Tremaine, and it was housed in a dilapidated old slum on Seventh Avenue, a block below Barney's clothing store. I have no idea when the building was new, probably sometime in the Middle Jurassic. The lower floors were filled with printing presses, shaking the whole structure as they rolled. The building had a hydraulic elevator. To make it go up or down, the operator had to tug on a rope outside the car itself. The building had long since been declared a hazard by the fire marshal, and so smoking was prohibited everywhere in it. (That didn't actually stop anybody, it only inconvenienced them a little. When John Campbell became editor a little later on, he kept a copper ashtray on his desk, copper because of its high thermal conductivity, and whisked it into a drawer when the early-warning system announced the