Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (25 page)

I would not want you to think that I believe some cosmic switch had clicked over in 1939 and then back in 1944. Neither is it true that between these arbitrary dates
Astounding Science Fiction
published seventy-two issues of solid immortal literature while none of its competitors did a thing but move in place. What
Astounding
did do, over a period of years, was to develop and, until 1950, keep writers who fairly often wrote a certain broad type of story well. It was a type of story which was better received by articulate science-fiction readers of those days than was any other type of story; those same readers were now ready to buy those same stories again in book form, and it so happened that a good number of people who had never read that kind of science fiction before were able to share their taste.

The ASF “Golden Age” in science fiction had been slightly anticipated by a similar phenomenon in crime fiction, with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others, emerging from the crumbled pages of
Black Mask.
Apparently something just before the War acted to create pulp writers who were willing to break out of the post-World War I shell of neverland cliches which persisted in the pulps until the middle of the 1930s. It may have been an echo of the same tough attitude toward life that had produced Hemingway and Steinbeck in the “mainstream” somewhat earlier. Crime stories in the new mode had been getting serious book publishing attention all during World War II. Now it was perhaps science fiction’s turn. The material was there. The new publishers picked it up and made books of it.

Fantasy Press went back a little farther, to publish the early E. E. Smith and Stanley Weinbaum as well as other forerunners of “modern” science fiction as these same book publishers now proceeded to define it, creating sharp distinctions from the past, and from Flash Gordon, simply by running full notices of previous publication and thus making it clear where the “good”—the most readable—material had come from. Centering their attention exactly on the Campbellian writers were Gnome Press and Shasta; while Shasta brought out Heinlein’s Future History series, for example, Gnome was busy doing Asimov’s Foundation stories. Arkham House,
Slan
aside, was meanwhile tending toward selections from such fantasy magazines as
Weird Tales
and
Unknown
, which had had little golden ages of their own and which Fantasy Press’s program also included. Prime Press did a little of both, including collections by Lester del Rey (. . .
And Some Were Human
) and Theodore Sturgeon (
Without Sorcery
) which split their sources mainly between
Astounding
and
Unknown
, and by George O. Smith (
Venus Equilateral
) which was without peer as an example of ASF wiring-diagram fiction. Shasta brought out the Don A. Stuart stories (
Who Goes There?, Cloak of Aesir
), and Gnome did van Vogt’s
The Mixed Men
and Henry Kuttner’s Gallegher stories (
Robots Have No Tails
, by “Lewis Padgett”).

In other words, in the few years between the end of the war and the earliest 1950s, these various people with their varied resources brought out the books which are still the liver and lights of any permanent collection of good science fiction. Random House had issued its legendary Healy-McComas anthology,
Adventures in Time and Space
, and Crown had brought out Groff Conklin’s
A Treasury of Science Fiction
, but Gnome had countered with Martin Greenberg’s
Men Against the Stars
, an entry fully qualified to run in that field.

If it hadn’t been for the houses listed in Paragraph One of this necessarily breathless history, grown-up science fiction might have taken years to find a permanent place in literature via the library catalogues. With the few exceptions mentioned immediately above, the established major houses hadn’t touched anything but Verne and Wells in years, the only significant wartime exceptions being Pocket’s original paperback,
The Pocket Book of Science Fiction
, and Viking’s
Portable Novels of Science.
Both of these had been edited and one assumes fought into life by Donald Wollheim, who has gone on to do his impressive job of making bricks without straw for Ace paperbacks. He, Healy and McComas, Groff Conklin and a few others might eventually have succeeded by applying unremitting pressure over a long period of time. The little specialist houses, operating out of lofts, bookstores and their owners’ basements, cut that time dramatically short. They made the 1950s into boom years . . . from which they themselves would draw little but disaster.

By 1951, these people had accomplished two major things, both suicidal. They had exhausted the supply of easily found, high-quality reprints from the magazines, and they had established the financial value of the SF book market. They had gotten to that point because you can succeed with almost any sensible small venture in publishing as long as you’re not doing something the potential major competitors want to do as well. At that point, the first Science Fiction Book Club ad had appeared on the back cover of a prozine. Except for differences of detail, it looked and read exactly like its sister ads for the Detective Book Club, which had been riding the back covers of the crime magazines for years. Merchandising had come to the business of publishing SF books for profit, and the incidence of major company names on new titles had begun to rise sharply.

A major publishing house has, by definition, the equipment needed to be a major publisher—a staff of editorial specialists, a production staff which does nothing all day but buy supplies and services having to do with publishing, and a sales staff which can consist of hundreds of specialists, some of them out on the road calling on bookstore owners they have known for years and others sitting home and writing punchy brochure copy. This is what these people do for a living. They have been trained for it under the impetus of believing that this is all they can do for a living. They are paid to do their one thing at least as well as their opposite numbers at the next major house. With this sort of organization, it is possible to produce a million copies of something that may look and be fractionally better than the work of one busy man working for himself. If you have a hundred such specialists, they can produce, say, ten times as many things to make a million copies of.

Once such a major organization has been put in train, it is committed by the inertia of schedules and capital investment. The sight of a major publishing company winding up to give birth to a new program is so impressive that few of its rivals can restrain themselves from following suit. Once the herd has been set in motion it must, by the nature of the beast, proceed along the line of least resistance for an indefinite period of time, leaving nothing in its wake but a stubble of grasses cropped too short to sustain life.

 

In the area of wholesale bookselling, the brief contention was thus between the specialists in science fiction and the specialists in publishing. In the area of simple packaging—of producing at a profit a book which appears to be worth the retail customer’s money—the contest was only a little longer in the drawing out. It was in fact extended past its natural run by something like a happenstance. The merchandising machinery having gotten turned on, the various sales organizations sponsored by the major publishers immediately needed more product than the publishers themselves were yet able to furnish. So for a little while the small houses were able to supply copies to the book club operations owned more or less by their direct competitors. Thus they acquired a little more money to operate on, at the same time that their choice of production standards was sharply narrowed to the more expensive bands of the book-making spectrum.

What this meant for the retail customers was that more conventional-looking science fiction books in far greater quantities had become available. Shopping for books became considerably more convenient. Book prices were reduced, in several senses; over the short term, there was the benefit of having the specialist houses throw their stocks on the cut-rate market in an effort to get hold of additional working capital or simply to bail out. Over the long term, book prices were reduced (not absolutely, but relative to the still rising cost of production) by the combination of high-volume sales and production economies of which only major publishers are capable.

In fact, the only place the SF book-reading public lost anything tangible at all was one from which the small publishers could not have rescued them, but from which the big publishers could. That was in the paucity of remaining publishable book-length material. The result was that the middle 1950s were bad years for quality, and looked worse by comparison to the immediate past.

The middle 1950s were the years in which we got the “novels” pasted together from series short stories, the “science fiction” by outside writers who had obviously seen a monster movie once, and the unfortunate experiments in hapless antiquarianism reminiscent of that pioneering California company which had staked its all on Ralph Milne Farley.

These were the years in which knowledgeable critics lambasted the major companies day and night. If Gnome Press had been able to bring out Isaac Asimov’s
I, Robot
, why in Heaven’s name couldn’t a giant outfit like Doubleday do better than Nelson Bond’s Lancelot Biggs series disguised as a novel? Answer, Doubleday wasn’t about to do
I, Robot
—yet. Gnome’s excellently manufactured edition, with its flossy Cartier jacket making it look exactly like a big-time book, was still very much on sale. Doubleday would of course get to it in the course of time, but meanwhile there was Max Ehrlich’s
The Big Eye
, and that was science fiction too. You could tell by the rocket on the title page.

It wasn’t all bad. Gnome’s
City
, by Clifford Simak, was the outstanding example of a pasteup that had been begging to be done. Doubleday’s
The Martian Chronicles
dates from that time—a beautiful Bradbury collection which owes part of its charm to the loose connecting passages between stories, which may be the fragile vestiges of earlier plans to make a novel. Simon & Schuster did take the bit in its teeth and publish an edition of
Slan.
Grossett & Dunlap came out with a mass-priced edition of Henry Kuttner’s
Fury.
Frederick Fell, hitherto known as the promulgator of Oscar J. Friend’s
The Kid from Mars—
which is not
quite
as bad as its title—began publishing the Bleiler-Dikty annual “best” collections of magazine stories, which served the function of providing the cinderblock base for Judith Merril to later build bigger and better for Simon & Schuster and Dell. And Twayne, another small but nevertheless full-scale publisher who hoped to ride up among the majors on the strength of this new boom, did something very interesting with its “Triplet” series, fostered by Fletcher Pratt and Dr. John D. Clark.

These were anthologies of three novellas each by three major SF writers, who were given a loose outline of a basic story problem and a detailed description of the solar system in which it was to occur, each writer then going his own way as he saw fit. This was one attempt to create books. With all the will and budget in the world, the science fiction magazines of that time could only supply the best of the new gout of wordage the book publishers now needed as they jockeyed for control of the market. They couldn’t supply all of it, by a long shot.

Perforce, the book publishers had to be willing to pay enough for original material so that good writers could be induced to occasionally forgo the magazines as a primary market.

No publisher in the world ever pays more than he has to, but the major publishers have people trained to pay that minimum with checks drawn on impressive banks, and with cheerily mesmerrhetic references to the freemasonry of the arts. In this case the book publishers were not only broadening the primary market for original SF, they were now applying the coup de grace to the little specialists, as well as shaking off the coattail riders in their own ranks.

Twayne was one of the companies which dropped out of the picture, But its program left some significant orphans. Among the ultimate results of Fletcher Pratt’s brainchild was James Blish’s Hugo-winning
A Case of Conscience
, which ran as a long one-parter in
If
before expanding up to its prize book length. Two other Twayne stories, an Asimov and a Poul Anderson, appeared as serials in
Astounding.
In its own lefthanded way, this was the first major case of important work being fed from a book publisher into the magazines—a complete reversal of the established precedence.

 

At about this same time, two other interesting things happened.

A publisher of paperback originals got on the stands with his edition of a middling-important novel before it had finished running as a serial in
Astounding.
And Doubleday published Cyril Kornbluth’s
Takeoff
, a major novel by a major magazine writer, which had seen no magazine publication at all.

After the inevitable stumbling start, the big book houses were getting their programs into full flight. In every other important field of magazine fiction, most of the long serials had in fact been already under contract as books. That had now become the situation in science fiction, as well, and with various ups and downs, that is the situation today. In all, it took the major houses about five years, from 1950 to 1955, to make it so.

After ten years, this pendulum may now be getting ready to swing back the other way. Too many new “novels” are not former magazine serials—however arrived at—but puffed-up novelettes. Some of them were books all along, cut down for magazine use. But by far the greater percentage are not—they are padded, patched together or published in a design form that makes a lousy forty thousand words stretch across too many pages which are mostly margin and elephantiasical type. They are sometimes written by third-rate writers who are being overpaid in compensation for missing the apprenticeship that magazine work forces on its steady practitioners. These flat souffles are in turn subjected to the attentions of blurb writers and sales promotion directors who describe and package them to be more attractive and rewarding than they really are.