Andrew Liptak

One of the things that I’ve really loved about this column is getting a sense of how connected everyone was. Truly, everyone seemed to know one another, even as small groups formed around certain editors. A case in point, over the last couple of columns, I’ve been looking at the Golden Age of SF, which is generally regarded as beginning with John W. Campbell Jr.’s rein at Astounding. Campbell’s star was bright and enduring, but it lost its innovative edge. H.L. Gold, I think, deserves more attention for his role during the Golden Age, as his magazine Galaxy Science Fiction provided some of the genre’s most enduring classics.

Go read Changing the Playing Field: H.L. Gold & Galaxy Science Fiction over on Kirkus Reviews!

Here’s my sources for this post:

• Alternate Worlds, James Gunn: Gunn’s book has a particularly good section on Galaxy and Gold’s influence during the Golden Age of SF.
• A Pictorial History of Science Fiction, David Kyle: This book has an excellent analysis of the importance of Gold and his work at Galaxy, giving me some very good information on how he impacted the genre.
• New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis: Amis provides some good information about Galaxy and Gold.
• Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss: Galaxy gets a brief mention here, chiefly in context of Alfred Bester.
• Seekers of Tomorrow, Sam Moskowitz: Moskowitz provides some good early biographical information on the beginnings of Galaxy Magazine, and Gold’s involvement with various authors.
• The Way the Future Was: A Memoir, Frederik Pohl: Pohl took over for Gold in 1961, and this book details his dealings with the man, as well as Gold’s final days in the editor’s chair.
• The Futurians, Damon Knight: Knight provides some good information about Gold here.
• Science Fiction of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History, Frank M. Robinson: Robinson has a good, important section on the influence of Galaxy Magazine.
• The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction, Paul A. Carter: Carter details some great information on Gold and his work at Galaxy Magazine.
• H.L. Gold Wikipedia Entry: I almost never use Wikipedia as a primary source, but in this instance, there were references to a source that I would have otherwise used, but didn’t have, which helped provide some good biographical information on Gold.
• Horace Gold Britannica Entry: This entry provides some good biographical information on Gold’s life that I didn’t find anywhere else.

Earlier this week, SF Grandmaster Jack Vance passed away at the age of 96. His writing career lasted over six decades, and he’s known for his fantastic worldbuilding in addition to his enormous volume of works.

Vance wasn’t an author I came across often as a kid – looking back through my anthologies this week, I found only a handful of stories, but the one that stuck out in my mind was ‘The Moon Moth’, collected in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume IIB. Reading up on his life, I found that most of my usual sources mentioned him sparingly – often in the context of his first great work, The Dying Earth. At other times, it seems as though he was an author who’s influence faded to the background, which seems to have suited his personality.

Go read Jack Vance, Inventor of Worlds over on Kirkus Reviews.

Sources:

• Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss: Aldiss mentions Vance only a couple of times, noting the context of his works.
• Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert: Vance and Herbert were fairly close friends. They traveled together and lived nearby, and it’s interesting to see the connection form through mutual interests.
• Science Fiction: What It’s All About, Sam Lundwall: I picked up Lundwell’s book recently on a whim, and while there’s not much, there’s a brief mention of Vance’s works here.
• Survey of Science Fiction Literature, vol 2, Frank Magill: This volume has a fantastic review of The Dying Earth, noting its influence and worldbuilding.
• The History of Science Fiction, Adam Roberts: Roberts devotes much space to Vance and The Dying Earth, which was particularly helpful early on.
• This is me, Jack Vance!, Jack Vance: This book was a critical one for learning about Vance’s life, recounted through his Hugo-award winning autobiography. It’s a really interesting read, and one that I’ll likely revisit at some point.
• The Genre Artist, Carlo Rotella: This is a great interview / feature with Vance from a couple of years ago.
• Jack Vance Biography, official website: An official biography that helped me put together some details about his life.
• Jack Vance Profile, ISFDB: No biographical details here, but it is a great look at the works that he’s written.
• Vance, Jack, SF Encyclopedia: A fantastic biographical look at Vance in the context of his works.

Last year, I picked up and read The Stars My Destination for the first time. It’s an astonishing book, one that I alternatively wish that I’d read it earlier, and that I’m glad that I read it now, with the capabilities to really get how important of a book it is. The book was used in a science fiction class that I sat in on this past semester here at Norwich, and it was interesting to see the student’s reactions to it.

I’ve been waiting to get to Bester for a while now, and after a bit of digging around, I’m astonished to see that there isn’t more about him in the SF non-fiction arena. Certainly, he appears in a number of sources (see below), but often, it’s centered around his two major, landmark works, The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. He had an exceptional career, working in the SF pulp, comic, radio, television, magazine and novel markets over the course of his life, all the while turning out an incredible amount of material. His career is notable for his writing and his sheer influence on the genre, and there is possibly no other author writing at this time that had more of an influence on where the genre would go.

Go Read The Nomadic Alfred Bester, Renaissance Man, over on Kirkus Reviews.

Here’s the sources that I used for this piece:

• Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Brian Aldiss: This book is a collection of biographical essays, and Bester contributed a fantastic one to this book. This was probably one of the more important sources I worked from, because it gave some considerable insight into Bester as a person and how he went about doing things. You can read the essay online here.
• The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, edited by Arthur Evans, et al: This anthology contains Bester’s Fondly Fahrenheit, prefaced with a short, but very good biography of the author.
• William Gibson on The Stars My Destination, William Gibson: this short essay appears on the LOA website, and is a fitting tribute to the novel. Read it here.
• Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction, by James Gunn: This book contained some excellent information surrounding the formation of The Demolished Man, which was helpful.
• Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, by Gerald Jones: This book contains a single reference to Bester, but discusses in depth the reasons for why he and his editors went over to DC Comics. It also seems that Bester had a fairly positive relationship with them, which is at odds with how they’re portrayed in this book.
• Survey of Science Fiction Literature, vol 2 & 5, edited by Frank Magill: These two volumes contain reviews of The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, which helped provide some good additional insight into their works.
• The History of Science Fiction, by Adam Roberts: Roberts’ text really talks at length about TSMD, and points to their influence when it comes to the New Wave and Cyberpunk.
• Science Fiction of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History, by Frank M. Robinson. This book had some good, extra information on Bester’s life.
• Alfred Bester, by Carolyn Wendell: This short book is part of the Starmont Reader’s Guides to Contemporary Science Fiction and Fantasy: This is a short book that I borrowed through interlibrary loan, which has some good additional information on Bester. As far as I can see, it’s the only biography out about him.
• American science Fiction: Five Classic Novels, 1956-1958, edited by Gary K. Wolfe: This volume is one that I’ve referenced before, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It contains TSMD, and a great biographical blurb on the author.

I’m also particularly indebted to Maxwell Neely-Cohen for sending me an interview with Bester in Tangent Interviews. This was an interesting piece taken sometime in the 1980s, with a fairly interesting interview with Bester about some of his stories, and how he generally went about the writing process. There’s not a whole lot that’s new here when taken against some of the other sources that I had, but it’s a great look at Bester as a person.

John Joseph Adams also provided some extremely helpful materials: An obituary from Locus Magazine, which shed some interesting details on his life, as well as an excerpt from Paul Walker’s Speaking of Science Fiction and a review of Tender Loving Rage in Science Fiction Eye.

Cyril Kornbluth, Chester Cohen, John B. Michel, Robert A.W. Lowndes and Donald A. Wollheim, from left. (Photo by Jack Robins, Tarrytown, N.Y., July 1939.)

One of the interesting things that I came across recently was the story of the Futurians at the 1st WorldCon in 1939. The Futurians were a legendary group of fans – quite a few notable authors came out of their ranks over the years, and it looked like an interesting story, one that was far more complicated than I thought.

Fandom is really an artificially constructed thing – Gernsback helped jumpstart it alongside his magazines with his Science Fiction League clubs around the US, probably recognizing that if you keep your readers engaged, you’ll have a more reliable cash flow. Would fandom have emerged on its own, without those clubs? Maybe, but I’d bet that it helped define the identify of a science fiction fan far earlier, and from what I’ve seen, you really don’t have the same communities in other genres (although that’s just from my own observation, rather than any actual research.

I’ll admit, I have a bit of an ax to grind with this piece: the fan community can be infuriatingly annoying at times. It doesn’t matter if it’s amongst book reviewers, 501st members, authors, literature fans, movie fans, or any other community, there’s always drama. And, it looks like there’s always been drama. It’s something that I’m a bit tired of, and I’m beginning to just ignore people who are drama-prone in my own life. It’s a bit liberating, but isolating, at times.

Go read The Futurians and the 1939 World Science Fiction Convention here.

The Futurians, Damon Knight. This is probably the best place to go to read about the Futurians, written by one of their members. It’s certainly one-sided, but it’s an interesting read.
The Immortal Storm, Sam Moskowitz. This is an exhaustive, egotistical and defensive book, and I wonder if Moskowitz had some lingering resentment about the event. This book is a fairly exhaustive (and it’s utterly exhausting to read) look at fandom. I found myself very disheartened by what I read here: it’s a petty survey, but it does contain quite a bit of information about the early days.
Basement and Empire series, Frederik Pohl. Pohl talks a bit about early fandom in this series of blog posts for his website, The Way the Future Blogs. These, and the rest of his website, are a very, very interesting read.
The Way the Future Was: A Memoir, Frederik Pohl. Polh’s biography is a neat who’s who of the early science fiction days, but he doesn’t go into much detail about the events of the 1939 convention, simply noting that it happened, and who was involved.

One of the things that I’ve found distinctly interesting about the Golden Age of SF is how the authors shape the field that they’re in, but also how much one can extrapolate a larger picture out of an author’s life. An excellent example of this is Judith Merril, through whom one can find an excellent viewpoint of the shifts in publishing, as well as a number of similarly-high-profiled authors writing at the same time. This is the first of probably a couple of posts about Merril – her career as a whole will likely require more space. Indeed, the Futurians themselves warrant a couple of posts of their own.

Merril was an interesting author to research. I remember reading some of her short fiction when I was in high school (Including, I *think* ‘Only A Mother’), and rediscovering her was a rewarding process. Frustratingly, most of my usual sourses really didn’t examine Merril’s contributions to the field, or did so in passing. However, there are some very good sources on her that I was able to draw upon.

Go Read The Connections of Judith Merril over on Kirkus Reviews.

Sources:
Judith Merril, 74, Science Fiction Editor and Writer, Gerald Jonas. This is Merril’s obituary, and provided a good snapshot of her life.

Better to Have Loved: the Life of Judith Merril, Judith Merril & Emily Pohl-Weary. This autobiography is a fantastic look at the life of Merril, as well as an excellent source for reading up on the Furturians, the Golden Age and a wide smattering of authors. It’s a little scattered at points, but there’s a great number of letters, recollections and sections about her early life.

The Way the Future Was, Frederik Pohl. Pohl’s autobiography doesn’t discuss Merril in great depth, but it does mention her frequently and provide some good context for her work in the early 1950s.

The Futurians: The Story of the Great Science Fiction ‘Family’ of the 30′s that Produced Today’s Top SF Writers and Editors, Damon Knight. Knight was one of the Futurians, and the book is a good, personal look at the rise and fall of the group, and Merril shows up quite a bit.