The Masks of Time

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It was the late winter of 1967 and I was preoccupied with a need to prove to the science fiction community that I was a reformed character. Back in the 1950’s, at the outset of my career, I had allowed some early discouragements in the marketplace to turn me into a purveyor of mass-produced claptrap; I had written (and sold) untold reams of stuff with titles like “Guardians of the Crystal Gate” and “Thunder over Starhaven,” unreconstructed zap-zap pulp adventure fiction. This phase lasted roughly from 1955 to 1958, after which I repented of my literary sins and resolved to write no more formula sf; but I wrote enough in those few years to tarnish my escutcheon for eons to come. When I returned to science fiction in the mid-1960’s, it was with considerably less cynicism and higher ideals, but I faced the severe problem of overcoming my earlier reputation and getting readers (and editors) to take me seriously. First with a handful of short stories, then with the novel To Open the Sky, I tried to demonstrate to my friends and to the readership at large that I had indeed outgrown the bad old days. But nobody much was listening. Just as I, as sophisticated and critical reader, had long ago decided that writers Q and P and R were such hopeless hacks that there was no sense wasting my time on even two sentences of their work, so too had most of my peers come to dismiss my writing out of hand.

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