Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (29 page)

T
he years of the decade of the 1960s were a good season for science fiction writers. The magazine markets for their work were not as numerous as they had been during the explosive growth of a couple of decades earlier, but there were enough of them to provide showcases for a lot of writers who were writing a lot of good science fiction in those years—yes, and sometimes taking in quite decent financial returns, too, because the giant slick magazines, too, had discovered science fiction, and magazines like
Collier’s
and
The Saturday Evening Post
were publishing Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, John Wynd-ham and others on slick paper for audiences of millions. And the long drowsing American book industry, which had failed to notice that such a publishing category as science fiction existed until a few threadbare fan groups began putting hardcover science fiction into the stores themselves, had finally caught on and half a dozen major publishing companies now had their own active lines.

Publishing people from other areas of the industry sometimes wonder, when the SF category enjoys one of its expansions, whether there are enough writers around to meet the demand. The answer to that is yes. There are. There always are, because SF has always generated its own major new writers, unceasingly. This happens regardless of the state of the market. What it is due to is the fact that some people with a good deal of talent discover that SF exists and that it gives its writers the otherwise scarce opportunity to think and write about all sorts of wonderful things.

They come because they want the scope of SF. Sadly, sometimes we lose them, even the most successful of them. But while they are with us we treasure them.

 

We would like to start by looking at a particular few of the writers whose careers began, or flowered (and sometimes also ended) in our period, especially four: Harlan Ellison, Walter Miller Jr., Larry Niven and Ursula K. Le Guin. (Though we will have things to say about others as well.)

Harlan Ellison, it is true, did not exactly appear from nowhere. He had been writing from an early age—had even had his work appear in
The New Yorker
, but had never really found his voice until the beginning of the period we’re discussing when he began the astonishing series of pyrotechnical masterpieces sometimes referred to as the “Repent, Harlequin” stories.

More than for most writers, Harlan’s stories and his life seemed both almost part of the same work of art. His home was in the hills overlooking Los Angeles—well, not exactly, in a technical sense, really overlooking it. To overlook the city from Harlan’s front door you would have had to be able to see through some miles of solid rock, because he lived on the far side of the hills, but the house was worth the trip. The name on the door was Ellison Wonderland. His writing office would not have shamed a banker, though it centered on only a typewriter that was neither computer-based nor even electrified, powered only by the muscles of Harlan’s fingers. His central sound system, he boasted, could deliver any music a visitor wanted at the press of a button; and the whole place, like any proper wonderland, had a secret chamber. And there, in those years of the 1960s, he wrote stories like “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman,”

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World,” “A Boy and His Dog,” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” and “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin,” racking up a considerable collection of Hugos and Nebulas in the process. (One writer said, “They ought to give him a Hugo every time he writes a story, just for the titles.”) There was no doubt that Harlan was a major SF writer. The only jarring note was that Harlan was dissatisfied with that pigeonhole, and so his production of SF stories dwindled as he went on to the exploration of other pastures.

Harlan Ellison was not the only writer who tried to shake off the SF label. Kurt Vonnegut even went so far as to quietly ask some friends who were members of the SF writers’ trade union, the Science Fiction Writers of America, not to vote for his novel
Slaughterhouse Five
for a Nebula. It wasn’t that he thought it was a bad award. He just wasn’t sure he could afford it. He had a good deal, and he knew it. His books were shelved in bookstores on tables of their own, up front and near the cash register, identified not by category but by his name. Sales were good. What they would be if the books were in the crowded shelves in the category areas he didn’t know, and wasn’t in any hurry to find out.

In a different category are the writers who make a great splash and then, with no apparent reason, disappear from the scene. By the sixties Walter Miller Jr. had become in a short period one of the most productive and esteemed SF writers around—John Campbell once remarked with a semi-embarrassed grin, “I just can’t stop buying everything he sends in.” People talked of him as the next Heinlein, sure to dominate the field for decades to come, especially after his 1961 novel,
A Canticle for Leibowitz
, won its Hugo. But then one of those invisible switches that people carry with them in their heads turned, and he stopped.

Then there’s Larry Niven, one of science fiction’s favorite writers for getting close to half a century now, but there was a time when that seemed unlikely to happen. Larry was born to money, was a millionaire as soon as the nurse began to clean him up to show to his mom. His parents were a nice young couple, related to the Dohenys of Doheny Drive and much other Los Angeles real estate. Mr. and Mrs. Niven loved their little boy, but as he began to become a bigger boy, then close to a man, there were worries. What interested him mostly, it seemed, wasn’t anything to do with business or investments or any of the things wealthy people enjoyed; it was the possibility of nonhuman creatures from other planets and rocket ships. In short, young Larry was a faaan. There were friends and family members urging the Nivens to try to discourage the boy’s aberration, some of them in terms of apocalyptic warning. They didn’t want to interfere with their son’s life, but they were getting concerned.

Then young Larry himself had a stroke of luck.

Like any true fan he had tried writing a story of his own. The SF magazine
If
had a policy of, in each issue, publishing one story by a brand-new writer, so Larry had sent his story there—and now the magazine had sent him a check. It wasn’t much, $15. The story was very short and
If
’s rates were low.

But it had sold. Larry was now a published author.

How this first display of earning capacity impressed the Niven and Doheny families is not known, but that was not the end. Emboldened, Larry sent
If
another story and before long a check came back for that one, too. The word rate was the same but the story was longer so this time the amount was ninety dollars. And a little later Larry’s third story sold, this one longer still and the rate better: $225. “And,” Larry once said, “they thought the curve was going in an interesting way, so I didn’t get much discouragement from my parents after that.”

 

Although Robert A. Heinlein certainly did not begin his career in the 1960s, he came close to owning it, with three more Hugos (in addition to his earlier one for
The Puppet Masters
):
Starship Troopers
in 1960,
Stranger in a Strange Land
in 1962, and
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
in 1967.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
in particular restored faith in Heinlein’s almost magical storytelling gifts, for, just when his talents might be expected to be waning, up he came with what was arguably his very best novel ever. It may even have put the seal on a cult following such that his fans were apparently willing to read anything he wrote after that—and some of the later novels were not so great—in hopes of repeating the excitement they felt. Although Heinlein usually missed the mark when he tried to write explicitly feminist fiction, especially when his protagonist was female as in
Podkayne of Mars
,
I Will Fear No Evil
, and
Friday
, he did practice a kind of “quiet” feminism in that his women and girls were not simply wives, daughters, or sweethearts waiting to be rescued: they actually did things—that is they had jobs that were significant and they moved the action forward themselves rather than always waiting to be rescued.

But the end of the decade produced a novel that seemed to be a harbinger of the explosion of feminist novels and women writers that followed in the seventies, eighties and nineties and it’s probably fair to say that this novel inspired both men and women writers to write differently and about subjects that especially interested the growing female readership. This was, of course, Ursula K. LeGuin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness
, which won a Nebula in 1969. Especially remarkable is chapter 7, which can be excerpted as a short story on its own, and its challenging series of ideas beginning with the rhetorical opening, “Consider . . .” The fact that the protagonist is a black man is usually ignored by feminist critics who get caught up in the implications of Le-Guin’s gender comments, but it fit into the tradition of Heinlein’s making Juan Rico Hispanic in
Starship Troopers
and Manuel black in
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
. Today even unadventurous writers will commonly make women and minorities be scientists and hold positions of responsibility (like mayor, governor, president, captain, commander, lieutenant, etc.) and women and girls do not need to rely on men and boys to figure out the clues to solve problems.

. . . So say the two of us.

However, one of us (Hull) is demanding that the other of us (Pohl) close this enterprise by saying a few words about himself as a writer in the decade of the 1960s. And so I therefore shall.

I should say that I wasn’t a full-time writer in the 1960s. Horace Gold, the editor of
Galaxy
and
If,
was in poor health. For some time he had been increasingly unable to deal with the issues involved in getting the magazines out and had asked me for my assistance. At the last he had had to resign and Bob Guinn, the publisher, had asked me to take the job. I couldn’t say no. Being given a magazine to edit, to me, is like being given the world’s best set of electric trains when you are twelve years old. It’s fun. Even dealing with the authors was pleasurable—well, more often than not, it was. Not surprisingly, SF writers have enough traits in common that it is easy for friendships to form. True, editing did interfere with writing in unexpected ways. There were sometimes stories I couldn’t write because they were close to the kinds of stories some of my contributors were writing. Sometimes I suggested these to the contributor. There were even some I didn’t want to write because I knew a contributor who could write that particular story far better than I. Neutron stars were hot news at the time and so I asked Larry Niven for a neutron-star story. It won him his first Hugo.

But such conflicts are rare. And one of the reasons why I’ve enjoyed doubling up as writer and editor so frequently is that editing has made me a better writer. Looking to see what another person has done wrong has definitely sharpened my perceptions of flaws of my own.

I think it may have been true for others, even including John Campbell. His work before he became an editor was pretty much derivative, particularly of Doc Smith’s space-operas. He didn’t do much to touch the heart and soul until after his experience with editing, when he became Don A. Stuart. (Sadly, he didn’t keep the writing up as other interests came along.)