Before the Universe

Начало книги

In the late 1930s in New York City, a bunch of us kids, fans anxious to become twos, joined together in The Futurian Society of New York. Don Wollheim was the "old man" of the group. He had been old enough to vote in the presidential election of 1936; most of the rest of us wouldn't make it for several years thereafter. The other members included Dirk Wylie, Robert W. Lowndes, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson, John B. Michel—well, the story of the Futurians has been told often enough.* (* And is the subject of a forthcoming nonfiction book by Damon Knight.)

And to us was drawn, around 1938, a young, plump, bright fellow from the farthest north part of Manhattan you can be in without striking the Bronx, Cyril Kornbluth.

In 1939 I became editor of two P*R*O*F*E*S*S*I*O*N*A*L science fiction magazines called Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. They were low-budget projects in every respect. The magazines sold for a dime and fifteen cents respectively, and paid their writers (and me) accordingly. In order to acquire enough stories to put an issue together without leaving a sizeable fraction of the pages blank, I had to beat the bushes for cheap talent. The first and most obvious place to beat was within The Futurian Society. In putting together one issue, I found myself ten thousand words short, and had something like $35 left in my budget to buy a story with. So I took my troubles to the fannish commune on Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, where half a dozen of the Futurians lived, and Cyril Kornbluth and Dick Wilson undertook to fill the hole for me. They stayed up all night, each banging away on his own typewriter.

Читать дальше →