Страница 3 из 134
Trying to mask panic, I asked to see the editor. The girl behind the desk (I can see the scene in my mind’s eye right now exactly as it was) spoke briefly on the phone and said, “Mr. Campbell will see you.”
She directed me through a large, loftlike room filled with huge rolls of paper and enormous piles of magazines and permeated with the heavenly smell of pulp (a smell that, to this day, will recall my youth in aching detail and reduce me to tears of nostalgia). And there, in a small room on the other side, was Mr. Campbell.
John Wood Campbell, Jr., had been working for Street amp; Smith for a year and had taken over sole command ofAstounding Stories (which he had promptly renamedAstounding Science Fiction) a couple of months earlier. He was only twenty-eight years old then. Under his own name and under his pen name, Don A. Stuart, he was one of the most famous and highly regarded authors of science fiction, but he was about to bury his writing reputation forever under the far greater renown he was to gain as editor.
He was to remain editor ofAstounding Science Fiction and of its successor,Analog Science Fact-Science Fiction, for a third of a century. During all that time, he and I were to remain friends, but however old I grew and however venerable and respected a star of our mutual field I was to become, I never approached him with anything but that awe he inspired in me on the occasion of our first meeting.
He was a large man, an opinionated man, who smoked and talked constantly, and who enjoyed, above anything else, the production of outrageous ideas, which he bounced off his listener and dared him to refute. It was difficult to refute Campbell even when his ideas were absolutely and madly illogical.
We talked for over an hour that first time. He showed me forthcoming issues of the magazine (actual future issues in the cellulose-flesh). I found he had printed a ‘fan letter of mine in the issue about to be published, and another in the next-so he knew the genuineness of my interest.
He told me about himself, about his pen name and about his opinions. He told me that his father had sent in one of his manuscripts toAmazing Stories when he was seventeen and that it would have been published but the magazine lost it and he had no carbon. (I was ahead of him there. I had brought in the story myself and I had a carbon.) He also promised to read my story that night and to send a letter, whether acceptance or rejection, the next day. He promised also that in case of rejection he would tell me what was wrong with it so I could improve.
He lived up to every promise. Two days later, on June 23,
I heard from him. It was a rejection. (Since this book deals with real events and is not a fantasy-you can’t be surprised that my first story was instantly rejected.)
Here is what I said in my diary about the rejection:
“At 9:30 I received back ‘Cosmic Corkscrew’ with a polite letter of rejection. He didn’t like the slow begi
Campbell also didn’t like the first-person narration and the stiff dialog, and further pointed out that the length (nine thousand words) was inconvenient-too long for a short story, too short for a novelette. Magazines had to be put together like jigsaw puzzles, you see, and certain lengths for individual stories were more convenient than others.
By that time, though, I was off and ru
Many years later I asked Campbell (with whom I had by then grown to be on the closest terms) why he had bothered with me at all, since that first story was surely utterly impossible.
“It was,” he said frankly, for he never flattered. “On the other hand, I saw something in you. You were eager and you listened and I knew you wouldn’t quit no matter how many rejections I handed you. As long as you were willing to work hard at improving, I was willing to work with you.”
That was John. I wasn’t the only writer, whether newcomer or oldtimer, that he was to work with in this fashion. Patiently, and out of his own enormous vitality and talent, he built up a stable of the best s.f. writers the world had, till then, ever seen.
What happened to “Cosmic Corkscrew” after that I don’t really know. I abandoned it and never submitted it anywhere else. I didn’t actually tear it up and throw it away; it simply languished in some desk drawer until eventually I lost track of it. In any case, it no longer exists.
This seems to be one of the main sources of discomfort among the archivists-they seem to think the first story I ever wrote for publication, however bad it might have been, was an important document. All I can say, fellows, is that I’m sorry but there was no way of my telling in 1938 that my first try might have historic interest someday. I may be a monster of vanity and arrogance, but I’m not that much a monster of vanity and arrogance.
Besides, before the month was out I had finished my second story, “Stowaway,” and I was concentrating on that. I brought it to Campbell’s office on July 18, 1938, and he was just a trifle slower in returning it, but the rejection came on July 22. I said in my diary concerning the letter that accompanied it:
“… it was the nicest possible rejection you could imagine. Indeed, the next best thing to an acceptance. He told me the idea was good and the plot passable. The dialog and handling, he continued, were neither stiff nor wooden (this was rather a delightful surprise to me) and that there was no one particular fault but merely a general air of amateurishness, constraint, forcing. The story did not go smoothly. This, he said, I would grow out of as soon as I had had sufficient experience. He assured me that I would probably be able to sell my stories but it meant perhaps a year’s work and a dozen stories before I could click…”
It is no wonder that such a “rejection letter” kept me hotly charged with enormous enthusiasm to write, and I got promptly to work on a third story.
What’s more, I was sufficiently encouraged to try to submit “Stowaway” elsewhere. In those days there were three science fiction magazines on the stands.Astounding was the aristocrat of the lot, a monthly with smooth edges and an appearance of class. The other two.Amazing Stories andThrilling Wonder Stories, were somewhat more primitive in appearance and printed stories, with more action and less-sophisticated plots. I sent “Stowaway” toThrilling Wonder Stories, which, however, also rejected it promptly on August 9, 1938 (with a form letter).
By then, though, I was deeply engaged with my third story, which, as it happened, was fated to do better-and do it faster. In this book, however, I am including my stories not in the order of publication but in order of writing-which I presume is more significant from the standpoint of literary development. Let me stay with “Stowaway,” therefore.
In the summer of 1939, by which time I had gained my first few successes, I returned to “Stowaway,” refurbished it somewhat, and triedThrilling Wonder Stories again. Undoubtedly I had a small suspicion that the new luster of my name would cause them to read it with a different attitude than had been the case when I was a complete unknown. I was quite wrong. It was rejected again.
Then I tried Amazing, and again it was rejected.
That meant the story was dead, or would have meant so were it not for the fact that science fiction was entering a small “boom” as the 1930s approached their end. New magazines were being founded, and toward the end of 1939, plans were made to publish a magazine to be called Astonishing Stories, which would retail for the price of ten cents. (Astoundingcost twenty cents an issue.)
The new magazine, together with a sister magazine. Super Science Stories, were to be edited on a shoestring by a young science fiction fan, Frederik Pohl, who was then just turning twenty (he was about a month older than myself), and who, in this way, made his entry into what was to be a distinguished professional career in science fiction.
Pohl was a thin, soft-spoken young man, with hair that was already thi
Pohl was a friend of mine (and still is) and perhaps did more to help me start my literary career than anyone except, of course, Campbell himself. We had attended fan-club meetings together. He had read my manuscripts and praised them -and now he needed stories in a hurry, and at low rates, for his new magazines.
He asked to look through my manuscripts again. He began by choosing one of my stories for his first issue. On November 17, 1939, nearly a year and a half after “Stowaway” was first written, Pohl selected it for inclusion in his second issue of Astonishing. He was an inveterate title changer, however, and he plastered “The Callistan Menace” on the story and that was how it was published.
So here it is, the second story I ever wrote and the earliest story to see professional publication. The reader can judge for himself whether Campbell’s critique, given above, was overly kind and whether he was justified in foreseeing a professional writing career for me on the basis of this story.
“The Callistan Menace” appears here (as will all the stories in this volume) exactly as it appeared in the magazine with only the editing and adjustment required to correct typographical errors.