Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (23 page)

Harlan Ellison has said that Fred "remains one of the truest judges of writing ability the field of imaginative literature has ever produced." In his book,
Transformations: The Story of Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970,
Mike Ashley adds, "that ability, along with his perspicacity and tenacity [allowed Pohl] to shepherd his magazines through the wilderness of the early sixties and make them among the most exciting and rewarding publications of their day."

The seventies found this man of many hats busily editing brilliant novels for Bantam (Joanna Russ's
The Female Man
and Samuel Delany's
Dhalgren
both came out in 1975), as well as producing his own award winning books—the 1976 Nebula award winner
Man Plus,
the 1977 Hugo and Nebula winner
Gateway
and 1979's National Book Award winner
Jem.
He also managed to be supportive of a fledgling publication then-called
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
Three of his tales appeared in 1979 issues of
Asimov's.
Although there are some gaps, Fred averaged roughly a story a year in
Asimov's
from 1979 through 1994. These include the March 1979 Nebula finalist "Mars Masked" and January 1985's Hugo award winner "Fermi and Frost."

Perhaps because of his renown, very little bio information accompanies these stories. The few that carry interesting tidbits mention his wife, "the least stern of professors, Betty Ann Hull," his devotion to the internationalization of SF, and his apprehension about humanity's future. The introduction to "Fermi and Frost" stresses his concern about nuclear winter; the intro to the November 1986 story, "Iriadeska's Martians" mentions that Fred "has represented the U.S. State Department in such diverse countries as Singapore, the Soviet Union, and New Zealand, and he has attended international conferences in far flung places like the People's Republic of China, Brazil, and Yugoslavia." The intro to Fred's 1992 story, "The Martians," says that, "Mr. Pohl's latest book,
Our Angry Earth
[written in collaboration with Isaac Asimov], is a nonfiction work about the damage we're doing to our environment, and the consequences and remedies thereof."

I never knew Fred very well, but I always felt connected to him. In 2002, when I was pregnant with my younger daughter, I was suddenly hospitalized for a suspected blood clot. I was cross. The situation had upended my routine. I had a very frightened eight-year-old at home and I was on the phone with my assistant figuring out how deadlines were going to be met when a hospital chaplain showed up at my bedside. I'm not religious and I wasn't thrilled, but somehow the good angel on one of my shoulders decked the little devil on the other. Rather than coldly turning her away, I decided to engage the chaplain in conversation.

She was astonished to learn that I managed an SF magazine. Before she'd become a minister, she told me she'd once worked as an editorial assistant for Fred at
Galaxy
and
If.
This news lightened my mood. I took it as a good omen and was unsurprised when test results later showed that I was fine. Although I didn't catch her name and Fred and I never did figure out who she was, it seemed obvious to me that there is a secret cabal of SF editors who look out for their own.

Fred sent me a new story a few months after I became editor of
Asimov's.
As always, it was a pleasure to work with him. "Generations" appeared in the September 2005 issue. It was his first story for us in more than ten years. The accompanying intro says, "Frederik Pohl's current principal activity is traveling around the world as much as possible—he visited his seventh (and last, because that's all there are) continent in 2004, and hopes to get to his fifty-first and fifty-second countries in 2006—but he keeps on writing when he can find the time. His short story collection,
Platinum Pohl,
out this year from Tor, is his one hundred and thirty-fifth book." Fred kept on traveling, but, alas, this was his final story for
Asimov's.

Late in the evening on the last day of LoneStarCon 3, I met Gardner Dozois, Kim Stanley Robinson, Susan Casper, Tor editor Beth Meacham, and others in our hotel bar. We all lifted our glasses in salute to the life and legacy of the multifaceted Frederik Pohl.

February 2014

There had been rumblings all through the spring of 1952 that
Startling Stories
was going to publish something special that summer, a truly startling story indeed, a taboo-smashing novella by a brilliant newcomer named Philip José Farmer.
Startling Stories
had emerged in the previous few years as one of the leading SF publications, having transformed itself from the juvenile action-adventure magazine of the wartime years into a serious contender for the top rank. Its special feature was a policy of running a lengthy lead novella—thirty-five thousand to sixty thousand words—complete in each monthly issue. I was a teenage fan at the time, yearning for a career as a science fiction writer; I read all the magazines, I studied the news of the field intently, I kept alert for all the latest trends. Oh, yes, the advance word about this man Farmer and his game-changing novella caught my attention. It certainly did.

The first hint of something special ahead came in the April 1952 issue, when
Startling's
editor Samuel Mines called for greater sexual frankness in science fiction. Not for "exploitation," Mines pointed out. He would never ask a writer to "put some sex" into a story. But "if his story deals with people of different sexes, and they get themselves into a spot where a certain amount of sex interest is likely to spark between them, we see no reason why that should not be admitted.... There's the beginning of a policy for our science fiction. Let's print stories about people as real as our authors can make them. Let's deal honestly with their problems, their characters, and motives—and be limited only by good taste."

Modern readers, accustomed to graphic sex scenes and four-letter words in fiction, can have no idea how radical this statement of policy was in 1952. Federal laws prohibited the distribution of such strongly erotic works as D.H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
and the novels of Henry Miller, and a brief upsurge of "spicy" pulp magazines in the 1930s had led to a program of official suppression that left all American magazines that published fiction as clean as
Peter Rabbit.
What, then, was Sam Mines leading up to here?

The June 1952
Startling
gave us the answer: "We have just bought a story which came in cold—unheralded, unsung, unagented. It is called
The Lovers,
by a name new to science fiction, Philip José Farmer, but it is a story, we think, which begins the career of a fine new talent. It is fresh, vital, shocking, etched with acid. Your reaction to it is apt to be violent, one way or another."

I couldn't wait. And didn't. When the August 1952 issue of
Sta
r
tling
that featured "The Lovers" appeared, I began reading it at once. And read on and on, awed, overwhelmed, even, by the vigor of its prose, the ingenuity and inventiveness of its concepts, the headlong energy of Farmer's storytelling, and—yes—the unabashed frankness of the erotic content.

And now, after sixty years, I've reread Farmer's pathbreaking story—the original magazine novella, not the novel that he made out of it long afterward. I was afraid it wouldn't stand up to my youthful memories of it. But it did. It certainly did. It's not subtly or smoothly written, something I may not have been capable of noticing in 1952. But why should it have been? Farmer was a novice then, a brilliant novice but a novice nevertheless. And throughout his long, distinguished career he never hesitated to push his way headlong through a scene that he needed in order to establish a plot point or a chunk of world-building background, even if it brought forth some fairly awkward prose. So the novella is a bit awkward. It's also quite astonishing. This time around I found it exceedingly hard to believe that it was a beginner's work.

Farmer drops us down in a strangely altered future universe where Israel and a Bantu-Malay federation seem to be the major powers on Earth. Everybody else seems subject to a fiercely puritanical new religious cult that is pushing humanity out into the stars to conquer and convert the natives of all inhabited worlds, of which there are a multitude. A little of this background material he tells us straightforwardly, in expository chunks, but he leaves most of it for us to pick up as best we can as we go along. It's a story marked by remarkable intellectual generosity: the amazing abundance of invented speculative material, held in back-story reserve and gradually released to the reader with unusual skill for a new writer, makes "The Lovers" a rich feast for readers who admire the workings of a cunning extrapolative mind.

To find out why so much of the back-story is kept from the reader, I dug out a 1953 essay Farmer wrote for a little magazine called
Fantastic Worlds
and discovered that the original manuscript had been much longer—too long for
Galaxy,
the leading magazine of the day (and the top-paying one), which Farmer hoped would publish it. "So I cut hell out of it," he wrote. About a third of the story ended up on the cutting-room floor. And so what remained of it is unusually sophisticated in technique, a dazzling demonstration of Robert A. Heinlein's path-breaking practice of letting background information in a story be revealed by action rather than by exposition. It might not have seemed so sophisticated had Farmer not felt impelled to slice his novella down to fit a magazine's arbitrary thirty thousand-word space limit.

But
Galaxy,
though it prided itself on its indifference to taboos, rejected the story anyway. Had the sexual content been too strong even for
Galaxy's
editor Horace Gold? No, as it turned out. Farmer himself explains, in that 1953 article, that Gold had no problem with the sex, but objected to Farmer's use of a dictatorial far-future society that had developed as an outgrowth of Judaism. "Whatever my attitude toward minorities might be," Farmer wrote, "the story itself was dangerous [in Gold's view]. It, in effect, justified discrimination because minorities
might,
if they ever achieved domination, become dictatorial." Gold had wanted the story rewritten to eliminate the link to Judaism. Farmer found Gold's objection far-fetched, and he balked at another suggestion of Gold that he move the setting of the story to Earth, thus eliminating the carefully delineated alien background Farmer had so lovingly invented. "To carry that out would have meant wiping out Ozagen, Fobo, the tavern beetles, etc.," said Farmer. "I wasn't a world-wrecker. I couldn't do it." He thanked Gold for his input, sent the story in its cut-down form to Sam Mines of
Startling,
and his career was launched. As for all the background material he had slashed, it wound up in the lengthy sequel to "The Lovers," "Moth and Rust," which
Startling
published the following year, a much less successful work that has been reprinted now and then under such titles as
A Woman a Day
and
Timestop.

"The Lovers" is a whale of a story, a very special kind of love story, a trailblazer, a pioneering work. That was how I found it in 1952, and how it still seems to me more than sixty years later. It's sexy, yes, and certainly that caught my teenage interest back there in 1952, but it's the
way
the story is sexy that matters most.

It's not just a tale of "people of different sexes" who had generated "a certain amount of sex interest between them," as Sam Mines put it in his editorial. The "sex interest" involves a human man and an alien woman, a form of miscegenation that was astonishingly daring in an era when state and federal legislation still governed who could go to bed with whom. And Farmer's description of the sex act is something that never before had been seen in the pages of a science fiction magazine. "She insisted on keeping her eyes open, even during the climax," we are told.
Climax?
Very clinical talk indeed; such sex as there had been in the spiciest of the old pulps had been nothing more than an embrace and a line of asterisks. The boldest of the SF writers of the 1950s—Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon—had approached Farmer's degree of sexual frankness, but had never quite reached it at that time.

Farmer had an even bigger surprise in store. She keeps her eyes open in that big moment not merely to provide Farmer's readers with a bit of titillating detail, but because Farmer has worked out a perfect
science fiction
rationale for keeping her eyes open—and when he comes to his explanation of it, he uses words like "intercourse" and "orgasm" that surely had never been seen in the pages of a science fiction magazine before. I can't possibly communicate the impact that those words had for the SF readers of 1952. And, just as Mines had promised, the sexual content of the story is in no way exploitative: everything that happens between Farmer's two protagonists had a rationale splendidly grounded in speculative biology, a magnificent science fiction invention. When it ends, it ends tragically, and the tragedy too is not extrinsic to the plot but grows organically out of Farmer's startling SF premise.

Quite a story, yes. It earned Farmer a Hugo in 1953—the year that the first Hugo awards were given out—as Best New Writer, which is certainly what he was, even against the tough competition (Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Algis Budrys, and more) that that boom-time year provided. The science fiction field was never the same after "The Lovers." With his very first story Philip José Farmer had launched a revolution.

Two masterful science fiction writers,
Mike Resnick
and
Ken Liu,
combine their formidable talent to bring us the March 2014 lead story. While transitioning to their new life on a space station, an older couple whose past has included some very hard choices find that "The Plantimal" may not make their new decisions any easier.