Seekers of Tomorrow (14 page)

If science-fiction writing is an art that can be taught, there is probably no one in the world better qualified to teach it than Jack Williamson. His complete understanding of not only the writing techniques, but the changing approach to telling a story, has been demonstrated repeatedly by his adaptability to every shift in direction science fiction takes. Yet the record shows more than adroit adjustability and storytelling competence. It reveals an author who pioneered superior characterization in a field almost barren of it, real-ism in the presentation of human motivation previously un-known, scientific rationalization of supernatural concepts for story purposes, and exploitation of the untapped story poten-tials of antimatter. Most certainly, students of the subject have something to learn from him.

Thinking sociologists find it increasingly difficult to give a well-balanced evaluation of American Culture without con-sidering superman. To assemble a reasonably comprehensive bibliography of important references to that adventure-strip hero has probably long since passed the point of practicability. Yet the impact of this indestructible figure, capable of flight, X-ray vision, time travel, and accelerated motion, on millions of youthful Americans each year is sustained by seven comic books, daily and Sunday newspaper strips, a daily television show, motion pictures, and an endless array of novelties, toys, games, and sundry products.

The philosophy, ethics, prejudices, preferences, and blind spots of the man who guides the story line of superman are of importance to every parent whose child follows that char-acter, yet as a public figure he is virtually unknown, and in the publishing world only those directly involved with pro-ducing comic magazines could identify him.

Mortimer Weisinger, mentor of the superman chronology in all of its manifestations since 1945, and for a period before World War II, does not wear a cape and did not originate the character, though he knew Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, two science-fiction fans who first put the strip together in 1933, and he was aware of their five-year siege of marketing tribulations.

Mortimer Weisinger was born in Washington Heights on New York's Manhattan Island, on April 25, 1915. While Mortimer early showed a predilection for the imaginative works of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, he balanced this tendency with a healthy interest in the Rover Boys and Motor Boy series. The fatal shift came when his parents sent him to a camp one summer and he borrowed the counselor's copy of the August, 1928, amazing stories featuring in the same issue
Armageddon 2419,
the first Buck Rogers story, by Philip Francis Nowlan, and the opening installment of
The Skylark of Space
by Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.

While in later years Weisinger's fondness for food made him the perfect person to invent a widely adopted weight-losing diet, this tendency was curbed as a teenager by his skipping lunch to accumulate funds to secure overpriced back issues of amazing stories, science and invention and electrical experimenter from New York bookshops. The great thrill of his young life was a personal visit to Hugo Gernsback while that man was still publishing amazing sto-ries.

His father, Hyman Weisinger, manufactured slippers in Passaic, New Jersey, and the flaming passion of his life was to see his son become a doctor. Mort was enrolled at New York University, but neglected to mention to his father that he was majoring in journalism. He showed his experimental attempts at fiction, written in longhand, to a slightly older scientifictioneer, Allen Glasser, who had sold a few minor efforts and was especially astute at winning prize con-tests. A single bit of advice from Glasser stayed with him: "The most important thing in writing a story or winning a contest is the
angle;
you must have an angle that no one else has thought of." The unusual story twist, the novel approach in an article, and off-beat plotting in comic strip continuities were to become Mort Weisinger's trade-marks and the foundation of his later success.

While the science-fiction magazines fascinated him, he felt that an
esprit de corps
was lacking. This same feeling was held by others. A Chicago science-fiction fan, Walter Dennis, together with Raymond A. Palmer of Milwaukee (who had not yet cracked the professional science-fiction market), helped to organize the Science Correspondence Club in 1929. This was intended to further the discussion of science through correspondence among interested science-fiction readers, par-ticularly authors. The first issue of a mimeographed bulletin called the comet (later cosmology) from this club was dated May, 1930. Allen Glasser corresponded with Walter Dennis about the Science Correspondence Club and decided to form a similar organization, which he called The Scienceers. The charter meeting, attended by four, was held in the Bronx on Decem-ber 11, 1929. The first elected president of The Scienceers was Warren Fitzgerald, a Negro professional, about thirty years of age, at whose home in Harlem meetings were held. Weisinger joined immediately upon hearing of the group and became one of the most active members, serving as treasurer and pressing for the publication of a club bulletin.

This materialized as the planet (first issue dated July, 1930), with Glasser as editor and Weisinger as associate editor. While the Science Correspondence Club's comet was mainly a sophomoric rehash of fundamental science, The Scienceers' planet, in a sprightly fashion, placed more em-phasis on
science
fiction,
the planet (which lasted six is-sues) was actually the first of the science-fiction fan maga-zines, which today number perhaps 300.

The club received a publicity break when Allen Glasser won a $20 third prize in science wonder quarterly's competition, "What I Have Done To Spread Science Fic-tion." His prize-winning entry, which appeared in the Spring, 1930, issue described the club and attracted inquiries from many parts of the country (the founding of two other chap-ters was attempted), and was responsible for the valuable addition to the club roster of Julius Schwartz, a noted collec-tor of science fiction. Schwartz formed a friendship with Mort Weisinger which was to become lifelong.

Hugo Gernsback, publisher of wonder stories and science wonder quarterly, became interested in the group and made arrangements for a meeting to be held at New York's Ameri-can Museum of Natural History. He sent to that meeting his editor, David Lasser, who had just formed The American Interplanetary Society, which then seemed even more crack-pot and far out than a literary discussion group on science fiction. For that matter, the first issue of the bulletin of the american interplanetary society (June, 1930), was a four-page mimeographed affair, even less pretentious than The Scienceers' planet. Lasser exerted considerable pressure on The Scienceers to merge with The American Interplanetary Society. Only the older Warren Fitzgerald joined. When the other Scienceers members appeared reluctant, payment for rental of the hall failed to materialize from wonder stories. The club broke apart in violent disagreement as to whether they should foot the obligation. In retrospect, of course, a merger with The American Interplanetary Society, which has since become The American Rocket Society, the world's most respected civilian rocket group and publisher of astronautics, a mag-azine almost as impressive in size as good housekeeping, would scarcely have been called a sad fate.

While notices of The Scienceers had appeared every Fri-day in the now defunct new york world, Glasser and Weisinger yearned for greater recognition. One day they called up the bronx home news (now combined with the new york post) and informed the editor that the great British savant, Sir Edgar Ray Merritt, was to speak before the next meeting of the Scienceers, the only American speaking engagement he had agreed to. The name had been cobbled together from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Cummings, and A. Merritt, but the bronx home news didn't know that, and the paper ran fourteen column-inches about the glories of The Scienceers and their distinguished guest speaker.

This tomfoolery was a prelude to more constructive things. Prominent readers, writers, and collectors of science fiction received a circular announcing the monthly publication of the time traveler, the first fan magazine devoted
entirely
to science fiction and intended to fill the void left by the planet's demise. Allen Glasser and Julius Schwartz held top editorial posts, but Mort Weisinger, as associate editor, was one of the publication's mainstays. He attempted the first history of science fiction on record, beginning in the February, 1932, issue of the time traveler with Part II (the mystery of what happened to Part I has never been ex-plained), and creditably carried through as far as Jules Verne, where he terminated it after eight published install-ments. Winchell-type reporting was introduced to science fiction by Weisinger with his lively news column, "Out of the Ether," which reflected a wide correspondence with popular contemporary science-fiction writers.

The arrival in New York of Conrad H. Ruppert, a young printer from Angola, Indiana, who enjoyed the enviable dis-tinction of having won a $50 second prize in the "What I Have Done to Spread Science Fiction" contest with his sug-gestion of "Science Fiction Week," offered an opportunity to broaden the time traveler's horizons. He agreed to set up in type and print the periodical for nothing more than the cost of paper. This offer he implemented with action, and the March, 1932, issue was turned out on a printing press. Weisinger saw other potentialities in the printing press. Taking the best of his handwritten manuscripts,
The Price of Peace,
he sneaked into his father's factory after hours and used an office typewriter to put it into proper form for submission. He gained moral support from Dr. Robert B. Dow, a professor of English at New York University, who made some minor corrections and suggested that the story might be salable. He had been anticipated. When Ruppert, as Solar Publica-tions, turned the first of a series of pamphlets off the press, the title read
The Cavemen of Venus
by Allen Glasser. Weisinger's
The Price of Peace
followed it a few months later. In this tale, an American scientist announces he has discovered a green ray which will cause an atomic explosion. A number of U.S. naval vessels disintegrate in a great billow of smoke as the world watches. Major wars end out of fear of the "ultimate" weapon. But the entire test had been a hoax, believed only because of the scientist's reputation.

Encouraged by the friendly comments of those who paid the full retail price of six cents in stamps for the pamphlet, Weisinger took the story over to amazing stories editor, T. O'Conor Sloane, who accepted it and published it in the November, 1933, issue. The $25 Weisinger got for the story was invested in a second-hand typewriter and thus began a career.

But Allen Glasser again had beaten Weisinger to the punch in this official contest between them by placing a short story,
Across the Ages,
in which a man imagines himself back in Rome during a New York heat wave, in the August-September, 1933, amazing stories. When the story ap-peared, readers protested to Editor Sloane about the very close similarity between Glasser's story and
The Heat Wave
by Marion Ryan and Robert Ord, which had appeared in the April, 1929, issue of munsey's magazine. A careful check of the two stories indicates that very few changes were made in Glasser's story.

Sloane was fit to be tied. He had just been through apolo-gizing in print to A. Merritt (amazing stories, June, 1933) for "many similarities in descriptions, characterization and situations" in the story
Beyond the
Veil of Time
by B. H. Barney, published in the Fall-Winter, 1932, issue of amazing stories quarterly, to those in two of Merritt's books,
The Moon Pool
and
The Face in the Abyss.
Sloane was at the moment involved in the very embarrass-ing situation of having published in his February, 1933, issue a story called
The Ho-Ming Gland
by Malcolm R. Afford, which was identical with
The Gland Men of the Island
by the same author published by wonder stories two years earlier in its January, 1931, number. It developed that Afford had
first
sent the story to Sloane more than four years before. When after a year it did not appear, he mailed a copy to wonder stories, who accepted and published it. Characteris-tically, Sloane had just gotten around to pulling it out of inventory. This latest situation with Glasser, following on the heels of the others, was just too much. Any of Glasser's friends with professional aspirations were not welcome.

This made final a split that had begun earlier when Weis-inger, Schwartz, Ruppert, Maurice Ingher, and Forrest J. Ackerman had formed a corporation for the publication of science fiction digest, a semiprofessional magazine along the lines of the time traveler. Publication of the new magazine began with its September, 1932, issue. The Octo-ber, 1932, issue incorporated the time traveler but with-out Glasser. the science fiction digest (later called fantasy maga-zine) was a remarkable publication. Until its demise with the January, 1937, number, its pages comprised a virtual ency-clopedia of information concerning the science-fiction world: news, biography, bibliography, criticism, exposes, as well as pastiches, poetry, and fiction. Professionals contributed fiction gratis, much of which later found its way into the newsstand magazines. Its most impressive achievement was assembling a round-robin story titled
Cosmos,
each part complete in itself, written by eighteen authors and running 5,000 to 10,000 words an installment. The contributors read like a "Who's Who" of the period, including A. Merritt, E. E. Smith, John W. Campbell, Ralph Milne Farley, Otis Adelbert Kline, Da-vid H. Keller, Edmond Hamilton, Raymond A. Palmer, Ar-thur J. Burks, Eando Binder, P. Schuyler Miller, Francis Flagg, Bob Olsen, L. A. Eshbach, Abner J. Gelula, J. Harvey Haggard, E. Hoffman Price and Rae Winters (a pen name of Palmer's). The key idea man of the publication was Weisinger. He gathered much of the hot news and showed considerable skill at interviews of well-known authors, editors, and artists. As a by-product of this labor of love, he uncovered numerous pen names of well-known authors and used this material as the basis of the article "Why They Use Pen Names," published in the November, 1934, author & journalist. Willard E. Hawkins, the publisher, while sympathetic to science fiction, as an occasional writer himself, was unable to pay Weisinger for the article, but offered free advertising space in exchange. Weisinger suggested to Julius Schwartz that they seize the offer to create and promote The Solar Sales Service, a literary agency specializing in the placement of fantasy. Their "stable" of authors grew as that advertisement got results, including Earl and Otto Binder, the two brothers who then cooperatively wrote under the name of Eando Binder, J. Harvey Haggard, H. P. Lovecraft, Ralph Milne Farley, Da-vid H. Keller, Henry Hasse, Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, and Edmond Hamilton. Several of the stories they received were rejects which the author had been unable to sell. For these, the ingenious agents resorted to the technique of chang-ing the titles and retyping the first few pages, then resubmit-ting them. The results were creditable. Their most outstanding achievement was handling the out-put of the brilliant young science-fiction star, Stanley G. Weinbaum. They sold Weinbaum consistently to the leading market of the day, astounding stories. Their adroitness with that talented author, who was to leave his mark on an entire generation of writers, attracted other high caliber clients, including John Taine (the science-fiction pen name of Eric Temple Bell, well known as a mathematician and histo-rian of mathematics) whose
Twelve Eighty Seven
they placed in astounding stories.