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[cblj_backup]

droolfangrrl recommended, long enough ago that I don't remember why, an autobiography to me: The Way The Future Was by Frederik Pohl. A day after I started reading it, Pohl died, which did rather spoil the ending.

Don't look at me like that, having read his autobiography I'm pretty sure he'd find that joke hilarious.

The Way The Future Was is the personal autobiography of a science fiction writer, but it's also the biography of the "golden age" of Science Fiction, from the forties through the seventies.

Damon Knight says that, as children, all we science-fiction writers were toads. We didn’t get along with our peers. We had no close friends and were thus thrown on our own internal resources. Reading, particularly science fiction, filled the gaps. A more charitable explanation might be that most science-fiction readers were precocious kids who got little reward from the chatter of their subteen schoolmates and looked for more stimulating companionship in print. --p.6

Pohl got into scifi via loaned magazines and clubs at a pretty young age, and as an adult he worked as a writer, ad man, editor, and agent as well as belonging to various amateur and professional scifi clubs. He was clearly a very bright man and he knew pretty much every big name in the business (his mournful comparisons between himself and Isaac Asimov cracked me up) and yet refrained from dishing much dirt.

As time went on, some of the activities of SFWA seemed to me to be of dubious value. I began to question some of them [...] so in disgust I quit the organization.This is not an unprecedented act. A fair share of SFWA’s best and most committed members have resigned from time to time. It is a normal activity, both an accepted form of political statement, like trashing the dean’s office, and a sort of maturation rite, like a bar mitzvah. --p. 515

All it takes to publish a fanzine is the will to make it happen, and maybe access to somebody else’s mimeograph machine, and in a pinch you can get by without the latter. (There have been carbon-copied fanzines, limited to as many sheets of paper as you can roll into a typewriter.) --p. 75

The book is interesting as a historical document pre-internet, too; Pohl was writing about an era without the internet while still existing in an era without the internet, but he was writing about fandom, fanzines, conventions, and general fannish interaction as it existed in the days of snail mail.

When you invent a new civilized planet, you have to invent a new society to inhabit it; when you invent a new society, you make a political statement about the one you live in. Every writer is in some sense a preacher. (Why else would anyone write a book?) --p. 34

[Stanley] Weinbaum invented in it a character of a sort no one had thought to create before, an ostrich-shaped alien creature named Tweel who didn’t think, talk, act, or look like a human, but was nevertheless a person. All other writers in the field, once the egg had been demonstrated to stand on its end, immediately began to invent personalized alien creatures of their own... --p. 85

Pohl's insights into the business of book publishing are a little out of date by now; business is done differently and nearly everything surrounding it is conducted differently as well. That said, his discussion of writing and the ways in which people approach the task are still very relevant.

There I met my longtime friend Eddie Cope, the sage of Houston, Texas, who pased on to me all he had learned at the University of Texas’s drama department. (“There are only three reasons for any line: to show character, advance the action, or get a laugh.” “If you show a gun on the stage, you have to fire it.” Etc. They are all good rules, tolerant about being broken when necessary.) --p. 274

Pohl is funny and not too arrogant, and when he does say something particularly self-complimentary he tends to lampshade it to remind us that while he's aware he's being arrogant, we're the ones reading the book.

It's a surprisingly quick read, given it's not a short book, and it rarely gets boggd down by tedious details as a lot of biographies and autobiographies tend to do. There is some incidental discussion of racism and homophobia, and the female cast is somewhat limited to the wives of other writers, but this IS scifi lit in the mid-20th century, so that's regrettable but not unexpected.

Final Verdict: Thoroughly enjoyable, funny, and not a little educational. I'm not sure it's a book one would want to go out and buy, because I think it's a sort of one-read kind of book, but I wouldn't feel my money was wasted if I did buy it.

Comments

[droolfangrrl.livejournal.com]

You had posted a photo of that crowd when they were wee ickly fans.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Right! The early con photos. At any rate, thanks for the recc, it was awesome :D

[pxr5.livejournal.com]

Now you need to catch up on his blog. The Way The Future Blogs. Really quite excellent stuff.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Aaw man, he had a blog too!

[evilstorm.livejournal.com]

Pohl won my heart with Day Million (http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/9781451637892/9781451637892___9.htm). Forward-looking, hilarious satirical scifi short--freaking fantastic.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

The idea is great, but man that is some hard going to get there. :D

[daizy2k2.livejournal.com]

For RFM:

I'm participating in a 5k on October 5 to raise money for the American Heart Association. If anyone wants to donate, my page is here:
http://heartwalk.kintera.org/faf/r.asp?t=4&i=1048950&u=1048950-392397832&e=7143280275

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Can RFM!