Rude Astronauts (26 page)

But before that, he had been extraordinarily successful, especially when you consider the times. The Depression nearly killed a lot of writers, but those years were kind to him. He had a nonstop imagination and fast fingers, and for a penny a word, Harry Hapgood cranked out stories by the bushel. I was reading all the SF pulps at the time—I was in high school in Ohio then—so I can tell you with personal authority that there was rarely a month that went by without H.L. Hapgood’s byline appearing somewhere. If not in
Amazing
or
Thrilling Wonder
, then in
Captain Future
or the pre-Campbell era
Astounding
or someplace else. “The Sky Pirates of Centaurus,” “Attack of the Giant Robots,” “Mars or Bust!”—those were some of his more memorable stories. Rock-jawed space captains fighting Venusian tiger-men while mad scientists with Z-ray machines menaced ladies in bondage. Greasy kid stuff, sure, but a hell of a lot of fun when you were fourteen years old. Harry was the master of the space opera. Not even Ed Hamilton or Doc Smith could tell ’em like he could.

You can still find some of his older work in huckster rooms at SF conventions, if you look through the raggy old pulps some people have on the tables. That’s about the only place you can find Harry Hapgood’s pulp stories anymore. I think his last published story, at least in his lifetime, was in
Amazing
in ’45 or ’46. The last time any of his early work was reprinted was when somebody put together a pulp anthology about ten years ago. When he died in ’66, his career in science fiction had been long since over.

That’s the main reason why he’s been obscure all these years. But there was also the New Hampshire hoax. He died a rich man because of that stunt, but he also blackened his name in the field. I don’t think anyone wanted to remember Hapgood because of that. At least, not until recently …

Startled and dazzled by the sudden burst of light, I looked up and saw a monstrous disk-shaped vehicle descending towards me. Rocket fighters raced from the sky to combat the weird machine, but as they got close, scarlet rays flashed from portals along the side of the spaceship. The rockets exploded!

“Dirk, oh Dirk!” Catherine screamed from the bunker next to me, fearful of the apparition. “What can it be?”

Before I could answer, Captain Black of the United Earth Space Force spoke up. “The Quongg death machine, Miss Jones,” he said, his chin thrust out belligerently.

I reached for my blaster. “Oh, yeah?” I snarled. “Well, they’ll never take us alive!”

Captain Black stared at me. “They’ll take us alive, all right!” he snarled. “They want us as specimens!”

—
“Kidnappers from the Stars”

by H.L Hapgood Jr.
Space Tales,
December, 1938

Joe Mackey; retired electrical engineer:

If I remember correctly, I first met Harry Hapgood back in 1934 or 1935, when we both lived in the same triple-decker in Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. I was about nineteen at the time and was working a day job in a deli on Newbury Street to put myself through MIT night school. So, y’know, when I wasn’t making grinders or riding the trolley over to classes in Cambridge, I was at home hitting the books. I got maybe four hours of sleep in those days. The Depression was a bitch like that.

I met Harry because he lived right upstairs. His apartment was directly above mine and he used to bang on his typewriter late at night, usually when I was studying or trying to sleep. Every time he hit the carriage return, it sounded like something was being dropped on the floor. I had no idea what he was doing up there … practicing somersaults or something.

Anyway, one night I finally got fed up with the racket, so I marched upstairs and hammered on his door, planning on telling him to cut it out ’cause I was trying to catch a few winks. Well, he opened his door—very timidly—and I started to chew him out. Then I looked past him and saw all these science fiction magazines scattered all over the place. Piled on the coffee table, the couch, the kitchen table, the bed …
Amazing
,
Astonishing
,
Thrilling Wonder
,
Planet Stories
,
Startling Stories
. Heaps of them. My jaw just dropped open because, though I read all those magazines when I could afford to buy ’em, I thought I was the only person in Boston who read science fiction.

So I said something like, “Holy smoke! You’ve got the new issue of
Astounding
!” I remember that was lying open on the coffee table. Brand new issue. I was too broke to pick it up myself.

Harry just smiled, then he walked over and picked it up and brought it to me. “Here, you can borrow it if you want,” he said. Then he added, very slyly, “Read the story by H. L. Hapgood. You might like it.”

I nodded and said, “Yeah, I really like his stories.” He just blushed and coughed into his fist and shuffled his feet, and then he told me who he was.

Well, I didn’t say anything about his typing after that, but once he found out that I was taking night classes at MIT, he stopped typing late at night so I could get some sleep. He figured it out for himself. Harry was a good guy like that.

Margo Croft; literary agent; former assistant editor,
Rocket Adventures
:

I was the first-reader at
Rocket
back then, so I read Harry’s stories when they came in through the mail, which was once every week or two. Seriously. In his prime, he was more prolific than Bob Silverberg or Isaac Asimov ever was. But the difference was, Silverberg and Asimov were good writers, even in their pulp days.

No, no, scratch that. At a certain level, Harry was good. He knew how to keep a story going. He was a master of pacing, for one thing. But it was all formula fiction, even if he didn’t recognize the formula himself. Anyone who compares him to E.E. Smith or Edmond Hamilton is fooling you. His characters were one-dimensional, his dialogue was vintage movie serial. “Ah-ha, Dr. Zoko, I’ve got you now!”—that sort of thing. His understanding of real science was nonexistent. In fact, he usually ignored science. When it was convenient, say, for a pocket of air to exist in a crater on the Moon, there it was.

But his stories were no worse than the other stuff we published, and he got his share of fan mail, so we sent him lots of checks. For a long time, he was in our stable of regular writers. Whenever we needed a 6,000-word story to fill a gap in the next issue, there was always an H.L. Hapgood yarn in the inventory. He was a fiction factory.

I finally met him at the first World Science Fiction Convention, in New York back in ’39. I think it was Donald Wollheim who introduced us. I was twenty years old then, flat-chested and single, ready to throw myself at the first writer who came along, so I developed a crush on Harry at once. He might have been a hack, but he was a good-looking hack. (
Laughs.
)

He had fans all around him, though, because he was such a well-known writer. I spent the better part of Saturday following him around Caravan Hall, trying to get his attention. It was hard. Harry was shy when it came to one-on-one conversation, but he soaked up the glory when a mob was around.

Anyway, I finally managed to get him into a group that was going out to dinner that night. We found an Italian restaurant a few blocks away and took over a long table in the back room. There was a whole bunch of us—I think Ray Bradbury was in the group, though nobody knew who he was then—and I managed to get myself positioned across the table from Harry. Like I said, he was very shy when it came to one-on-one conversation, so I gave up on talking to him like a pretty girl and tried speaking to him like an editor. He began to notice me then.

His lack of—well, for lack of a better term, literary sophistication—was mind-boggling. He had barely heard of Ernest Hemingway, and he only recognized Steinbeck as the name of his neighborhood grocer. The only classics he had read were by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. In fact, the only thing Harry seemed to have ever read was science fiction or
Popular Mechanics
, and that was all he wanted to talk about. I mean, there I was trying to show off my legs—maybe I had no chest back then, but my legs were Marlene Dietrich’s—and Harry only wanted to discuss the collected work of Neil R. Jones.

So I lost a little interest in him during that talk, and after awhile I started paying attention to other people at the table. I do distinctly remember two things that Harry said that night. One was that his ambition was to get rich and famous. He was convinced that he would write for the pulps forever. “Science fiction will never change,” he proclaimed.

The other was a comment which sounds routine today. Every other SF writer has said it at least once, but I recall Harry saying it first, at least as far as I can remember. Probably, because of what happened years later, it’s why it sticks in my mind.

“If aliens ever came to Earth to capture people,” he said offhandedly at one point, “they wouldn’t have to hunt for me. I’d volunteer for the trip.”

Joe Mackey:

Harry Hapgood was a hell of a good person back then. You can quote me on that. He put me up to a lot of meals when I was starving, and he always had a buck to spare even when his own rent was due. But the day I saw him begin to hurt was the day when John W. Campbell rejected one of his stories.

I had dropped by his place after work. It was in the middle of winter—1940, I think—and the MIT semester hadn’t started yet, so I had some time to kill. The mail had just come, and when I came into Harry’s apartment he was sitting at his kitchen table, bent over a manuscript which had just come back in the mail. It was a rejection from
Astounding
.

This almost never happened to him. Harry thought he was rejection-proof. After all, his stories usually sold on the first shot. That, and the fact that
Astounding
had always been one of his most reliable markets. But Harry’s old editor, F. Orlin Tremaine, had left a couple of years earlier, and the new guy, John W. Campbell, was reshaping the magazine … and that meant getting rid of the zap-gun school of science fiction.

So here was Harry, looking at this story which had been bounced back, “Enslaved on Venus.” Just staring at it, that’s all. “What’s going on?” I asked, and he told me that Campbell had just rejected this story. “Did he tell you why?” I said. Harry told me he had received a letter, but he wouldn’t show it to me. I think it was in the trash. “Well, just send it out again to some other magazine,” I said, because this is what he had always told me should be done when a story gets rejected.

But he just shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Something John W. Campbell had written in that letter had really gotten to Harry—it had cut right to the bone. I don’t think Campbell ever consciously tried to hurt writers whose work he rejected, but he was known to be tough … and now he had gotten tough on Harry.

Anyway, Harry told me that he wanted to be alone for awhile, so I left his place. I wasn’t really worried. I had confidence that “Enslaved on Venus” would be published somewhere else. But I never saw that story make it into print, and Harry never mentioned it to me again. I think he trashed it along with Campbell’s letter. It wasn’t even found in his files.

Lawrence Bolger:

Harry Hapgood became a dinosaur. His literary career died because he couldn’t adapt. The World War II paper shortage killed the pulps, so there went most of his regular markets, and the changes in the genre swept in by John Campbell, H.L. Gold, Frederik Pohl, and other editors made his kind of SF writing unpopular. Raymond Palmer continued to buy his stories for
Amazing
until Palmer, too, left the field in the late ’40s. By then, science fiction had grown up.

But Hapgood didn’t grow with the genre. His stories were pure romanticism. He paid no attention to scientific accuracy or character development. He persisted in trying to write Buck Rogers stuff. Other writers learned the new rules, changed their styles to fit the times, but Harry Hapgood wouldn’t—probably couldn’t—change chords. So while Robert Heinlein was creating his “Future History” series and Ted Sturgeon was writing classics like “Baby Makes Three,” Harry was still trying to get away with space heroes and bug-eyed monsters. The more sophisticated SF mags wouldn’t touch that stuff.

It was sad. He still went to science fiction conventions on the East Coast, but he was no longer surrounded by fans. They just didn’t want to talk to him anymore. The magazine editors tried to tell him where he was going wrong, why they weren’t buying his stories any more. I remember, at one SF convention in Philadelphia, overhearing John W. Campbell patiently trying to explain to Harry that, as long as he persisted in writing stories which claimed that rockets could travel to another solar system in two days or that Jupiter had a surface, he simply could not accept any of Harry’s work.

Harry never listened. He stubbornly wanted to play by his own rules. Gregory Benford once criticized science fiction which “plays with the net down,” SF stories which ignore basic scientific principles like the theory of relativity. In Harry Hapgood’s case, he was playing on a different court altogether. All he could write were stories in which lizard-men kidnapped beautiful women and the Space Navy always saved the day. But he was playing ping-pong among Wimbledon champs, and he wouldn’t realize that he was in a new game.

Margo Croft:

After
Rocket Adventures
folded, I went down the street to work as an associate editor at Doubleday, helping to edit their mystery line. That was in ’48. I had all but completely withdrawn from the science fiction scene by then, but I still had a few contacts in the field, people with whom I’d touch bases now and then.

Anyway … one of Doubleday’s whodunnit writers lived in Boston and I occasionally took the train up there to meet with her. On one of those trips I had some time to kill before catching the train back to New York. I had my address book in my purse and Harry’s number was written in it, so I called him up and told him I’d buy him lunch downtown. It was mainly for old time’s sake, but also I wondered if he had recovered from the collapse of the pulp market. By then, I hadn’t seen him in a few years.