The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (38 page)

"Harlan, I don't know what kind of story that is."

"Shit, man! Of course you do. Like you've been printing all along in
Galaxy
!"

Actually, I think
Dangerous Visions
was a pretty good collection, and I'm pleased to be in it. My story is called "The Day the Martians Came." Or should be. What it says in the book is "The Day After the Day the Martians Came," because when Harlan realized what opportunity lay before him, he couldn't help himself; he changed the title.

The 1961 World Convention was held on the West Coast. For Carol and me, it was our first real look at the area. We loved it, especially San Francisco and Washington State, and whenever the chances came from then on, we commuted back and forth. In 1965 the convention was in London. Not counting World War II for me, it was our first look at Europe, and we loved that, too. As one who firmly believes that all our energy reserves are being bled white and disaster is only a few years away, it sometimes troubles my conscience that I have become such a jet-fuel addict, but I do love traveling.

One of the great good things about my world is that a lot of traveling goes with the job. There are lectures to give and conferences to attend and meetings to be met. It isn't all joyriding. A lot of hours of work go into, for instance, the sort of tour I have done once or twice for the State Department, culturally exchanging views on science fiction from Skopje to Leningrad. Three weeks into the last one, I counted up and realized I had totaled less than seventy hours of sleep in the preceding twenty-one days.

But usually it's a little more relaxed, and in and among the talks to Bulgarian professors of English and the panels on the New Wave in Chester and Toronto I get a chance to see things I would not otherwise have seen, and meet people I could not otherwise have known. The circumstances are not always ideal. I have observed that my wanderings follow the seasons, but the wrong way around for my maximum pleasure; it is customary for me to need to go to Minnesota in January, and Miami Beach on Labor Day. No matter. The company is usually good. We've seen Stonehenge with Jack and Blanche Williamson, and spent a weekend on a Japanese lake with Brian Aldiss and Arthur Clarke and Judy Merril, not to mention some truly wonderful Japanese hosts and Russian co-guests. I don't ask for better companions.

Well. No one wants to see anyone else's travel slides, and I don't suppose you would sit still for very much reminiscing about Caribbean cruises with Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov and the Heinleins, or about the quaint old man who was curator of a rose garden outside Tbilisi, in Soviet Georgia. I don't blame you. I wouldn't want to hear it, either. But the point is that toward the end of the 1960s I was beginning to get bored with my job. Traveling made it bearable. But most of the traveling was only indirectly connected with editing
Galaxy
and
If
. I would lose little if I left, I pondered. So why was I staying on?

I do like being an editor. But I also like ripe avocados and chocolate malted milks; but when I have had enough of either, I have had enough. I was beginning to have had enough of the joys of editing
Galaxy
. Besides, it was beginning to interfere with my writing.

There is an obvious conflict between editing and writing. What I am not sure I understand is why sometimes the conflicts do not seem important and at other times they are almost insuperable. For the first five years as editor of
Galaxy
and
If
, the disease was in remission and I managed to do both with no particular strain. Bob Guinn had asked me not to write for the competition. Except for one or two stories in
Analog
and F&SF over that decade, I was willing to oblige him. If there was a story I felt like writing for its own sake, I wrote it. If there seemed to be an ingredient missing in the mix I was getting from other authors, I wrote something to fill the gap: I liked to see more "nonfact" articles than we had, so I wrote "The Martian Star-Gazers" and "Earth 18," wished for science-based comedy-adventure and wrote "Under Two Moons." Now and then I would do one for
Playboy
or some other noncompeting periodical, and altogether I managed to keep comfortable about writing while meeting the magazine deadlines. But then that began to be hard. I began to miss the dialectics of the author-editor confrontation, often an annoyance but always a spur. (The disadvantage of being your own editor is that you have no editor.) And there began to be simple pressure from time. Even with Judy-Lynn and Lester, nine deadlines a month were a lot.
Galaxy
was taking more than half my working time, some months nearly all of it. It wasn't paying proportionately, either; there was never a time when my writing income did not exceed the salary Bob Guinn paid me. I began to mutter in my beer about quitting this lousy racket and going off to write
really
.

Early in 1969 I got an invitation to attend a World Science Fiction Symposium in Rio de Janeiro. Everybody was going to be there, Poul Anderson and Forry Ackerman, A. E. van Vogt and Bob Bloch, Brian Aldiss and Alfie Bester, Jim Ballard and Arthur Clarke. It sounded like fun, and it was.

Because I had an unbreakable speaking date in Key Biscayne, we had to come a day or two late, but Rio was an enchantment. The SF Symposium was only an added afterthought to a major world film festival, and the city was full of superstars and starlets. Fritz Lang was staying at our hotel, nearly blind, living legend who had actually made those films I had seen only as resurrected antiquarian art. Carol and I went to a party at an embassy, and sitting next to us was, for God's sake, Nijinsky's nephew, while just across the table was a slim young man in a peekaboo black shirt named Roman Polanski. (I had never heard of him; a month or two later all the world heard of him when his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Mansons.) The Ouro Verde restaurant fed us the best meals I have ever had anywhere in the world, with a view of the Copacabana Beach and, once, one of the most impressively beautiful thunderstorms I have ever seen out over the bay. I stole time from the symposium to fly up to Brasilia, strange futuristic city on the
planalto
. It is the only place I have ever been where the guides point to an intersection and tell you, not what happened there in 1066, but what is going to happen next year. (It has an impressively cantilevered building called The Museum of the History of Brasilia. It was empty.) Rio was exactly what a tropical vacation should be, swimming on the famous beach, wandering among the tourist traps, dancing in the nightclubs, and, of course, participating in that permanent floating encounter group of the science-fiction community on the move.

And when it was over I came back to the
Galaxy
office and got some surprising news from Bob Guinn. He had sold the magazines to another publisher while I was away, he said. And what, exactly, were my own future plans?

12 How I Re-upped with the World

If I were ever going to make the break, there would hardly be a better time. My bluff was called.

But my pride was also involved. For several days I waited, irritable and anxious, for the phone to ring, to see if I was going to be invited to go with the magazines. When it turned out I was, it also turned out that the new publisher, Arnie Abramson, had the quaint idea that his editor should be in the office from nine to five. That settled it. I agreed to stay on as "editor emeritus," a title without duties, devised primarily to keep me from signing up with a competing magazine, and within a few weeks the editorship had passed to Ejler Jakobssen.
*

I wasn't particularly hurting for money, so I gave myself a month or two off, deferring the day when I would have to face my typewriter in earnest. Before the time was up, Ballantine began a reissue program which brought eighteen of my earlier books back into print in two or three large clumps. That produced an instant year's income, or a little more than I earned in an average year, and so there was no particular incentive to start writing then. So I gave myself a little more time off. We took the family to London and Paris that summer, closed the house and spent the Christmas vacation in Bermuda. Back to Europe in the spring. To the Orient the following summer. Now and then, between trips, I would sit at my typewriter and play with some words, but nothing much came out; I know I finished two or three short stories (but they weren't any good, and I have never even shown them to an editor). I started thinking about several novels. But whatever I put on paper seemed to twist itself in directions I didn't like. I gave a few lectures; wrote some articles now and then when someone called up to ask for a piece and the price seemed right. But what I mostly did, as far as I can now tell, was wait for the world to clarify itself, and that it refused to do.

Personal troubles began to crop up, some big, some small. My dear friend Evelyn del Rey was killed in a car accident; her husband, Lester, stayed in the house down the road for a time, but before long he moved into New York and I lost his companionship, too. My children were suffering various sorts of growing pains; they dealt with them as wisely and well as any other young people growing into a complicated world, and maybe somewhat better than most, but there were strains. My own general dissatisfaction did not help matters. Carol and I began having marital difficulties; there were all these clouds, none of them bigger than a man's hand, but among them they shut out a lot of the sun.

Part of the trouble, I am sure, is that I was turning fifty, and not liking it a bit. I had somehow got it firmly in my head that I would never live to half a century. As it got closer it seemed less and less desirable.
Everything
seemed less desirable.

I don't mean that my days were all misery. There were good times, but they never lasted very long. There weren't really any very bad times, just gray, dull, stagnating times. About the only thing I could count on for a lift was travel. When Carol and I went to Japan in the summer of 1970, it was a ball. I've seldom enjoyed myself more. We grooved on Japan. We were delighted with all our hosts, Tetsu Yano and Hiro Hayakawa and Aritsune Toyota and, perhaps most of all, Hiroya Endo. It was an international conference, and there were some old friends to share Japan with us: Brian Aldiss, representing England; Judith Merril, Canada (having given up her birthright U.S. citizenship to become a Canadian landed immigrant); Arthur Clarke, representing more or less everywhere, but domiciling himself in Sri Lanka, nee Ceylon. (They were having some sort of halfhearted revolution in Ceylon at the time, and Arthur spent a lot of his time trying to get news of how close the fighting was to his scuba-diving school.) The Japanese had invited the Soviets to send some writers, and they sent a delegation: Yuli Kagarlitski, most amiable and best informed of East-bloc sf literary critics; Vassili Zakharchenko, tall, imposing writer-editor, with the courtliest of manners and the most commanding expertise on a hundred different subjects; Yeremy Parnov, the one member of the team whose writing I knew at all first-hand (I had published one of his stories in translation in
International Science Fiction
a couple of years before); a Ukrainian sf writer; a girl translator. Carol and I had met Kagarlitski a few years earlier in London, when he was there for the H. G. Wells Centennial (one of his books was a Marxist criticism of Wells) and we were on some sort of junket. The others were all new to us and, at first, rather remote.

We had all traveled a minimum of five thousand miles to get there and were accordingly fatigued. Before we had a chance to rest up and get comfortable with each other, the symposium started. For a while it looked like heavy going. The Japanese chairman gave a welcoming speech—in Japanese; then followed by consecutive translations into English and Russian. Arthur gave a rather formal talk on science fiction and the space program (followed by translations into Russian and Japanese). Vassili Zakharchenko gave an even more formal address on the necessity for international cooperation and the special qualities Soviet science fiction could add to world literature—in Russian; then into Japanese and English. All this took forever, or somewhat longer than that. We had signed up for two weeks of this! Carol and Brian and I looked at each other with dread. There had always been the chance that it would be a crashing bore, of course. It was the first time in history that the Soviets and the West had participated in a formal sf conference. Detente was still a couple of years away; international relations were touchy. We could not blame the Japanese for keeping it formal. It is hard enough to put on any kind of science-fiction conference. They not only had the problem of arranging logistics and providing a program, they ran the risk of starting World War III.

But they were more perceptive and more daring than we knew. As soon as the formalities were over Tetsu Yano took the stage. We Japanese, he told us (in English), have a tradition. You may think it silly or childish, but we would be grateful if you would humor our customs. We want each one of you to come up one at a time, and we will ask you to do something. And they had each of us, one by one, do a sort of vaudeville turn. Kagarlitski sang a little song. Judy was asked to give a two-minute speech on how it felt to be a grandmother. Arthur gave his version of a South Sea Islands hula. We all did something, all pretty silly; then we played a sort of group game (each of us required to say all the Japanese words we knew, as quickly as we could think of them); and then it was no longer possible for us to be stiff and formal with each other. For three weeks we lived in each other's pockets, and loved it, and each other.

We left Japan in a golden glow, on a JAL 747 to Hawaii. (It is an interesting experience to come into Honolulu on a Japanese plane, low over Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor.) Hawaii is perhaps the most beautiful place I've ever seen. We stayed at one of the tourist traps on Waikiki the first night, a typical hardsell Hilton where you have to pass a dozen boutiques to get to the registration desk and where every petal in the lei has a price tag. We were both tired, and resentful of the Miami Beach tinsel, so the next day we flew to the big island and stayed at what I have always thought the most beautiful hotel in the world, the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel. I had been there before, lecturing for the American Management Association, and for four or five years had been looking for a chance to stay there again. Palms grow through the open central courts. Every night two or three mantas fly through the underwater lights at the end of its dock. If you rent a car and drive along the roads, you pass unexpected valleys and waterfalls. Its beach is unfailingly sunny, and the water always gentle. But even Mauna Kea was a letdown after Japan, and we cut our visit short for home.