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Memoir from Grub Street

I EDITED AMAZING STORIES AND FANTASTIC STORIES, bimonthly science fiction magazines, from April 1968 to October 1968; it was not the best of times but was hardly the worst either (although in my youthful exuberance I then thought it was). I was the magazines’ only employee, edited them from my bedroom, delivered the copy-edited, blurbed manuscripts to the printer, proofed the galleys. Art and layout were handled by the publisher from his home, the publisher assuming more expertise in these areas (he had to be right) than I. Eventually, a dispute over control of the art—I commissioned a couple of covers but the publisher did not want to use them and I threatened to quit if he didn’t—caused me to be fired by telephone on a Sunday afternoon just as the Giants were about to score a touchdown (prophetically they did not), but that is not the subject of this essay nor is my salary ($100 a month to start, merit increases up to $150 right before the end), nor is my self-image at the time as the logical successor to Hugo Gernsback, T. O’Conor Sloane, Raymond Palmer and Paul Fairman. I was quite young.

Amazing, after Ziff-Davis publishers precipitately dumped it and its miserable sister in 1965 because of declining sales (although their last editor, Cele L. Goldsmith, was certainly the best magazine editor extant then), had fallen upon desperate times; the publisher had acquired it, if not for a song, at least for a medley, and it was his hope to float it along by access to the magazine’s backlist (Ziff-Davis had purchased all serial rights, granting unlimited reprint). Joseph Ross was his first editor, Harry Harrison unhappily the second and I ambivalently the third: only when Ted White began his ten-year stewardship and commenced to make real inroads on the publisher’s obduracy did the publication or its companion have any impact again.

No, my editorship was of little moment and although I was able to find and publish some expert work (Lafferty’s “This Grand Carcass,” “Yet,” Wodhams’ Try Again, Richard C. Meredith’s first novel, We All Died at Breakaway Station), I never thought of myself as much more than an adequate editor. I was able to separate good from bad and publish the better; this seemed the minimum requirement but I have subsequently learned that in contemporary publishing it is the last. My tenure was obviously too short to matter and the circulation of the magazines—possibly 24,000—would guarantee that whatever I did would be at the margins of a marginal field.

The real point of this reminiscence has to do with the submissions I faced and how they were handled, and it is this which might have relevance now. Consider the situation: Amazing and Fantastic were magazines at the bottom of the extant market. Unlike all the others, they paid on or after publication and, with a single exception (Tom Disch’s literary agent fought like a trooper), paid a top rate of two cents a word. They were necessarily perceived by any writer at any level as publications to be placed on the absolute bottom of the list; I would see only what Playboy, Analog, Galaxy, Worlds of If, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Venture, and New Worlds had rejected. 4

Nonetheless, the magazines which at that time were publishing only 12,000 words of original material an issue—three stories of average length or a long novelette and a short one—received through the six months of my tenure an average of one hundred manuscripts a week. The scripts came from unknown and unpublished writers in preponderance, of course, but at least 25 percent of them, week after week, were signed by recognized names: some of them, like Leiber or Lafferty, at the top of the market as then constituted; others, like Wodhams, Koontz, Meredith, or David R. Bunch, well in the middle range.

Most of the manuscripts were, to be sure, not publishable, but 15 percent of them (and more than half of those turned in by the professionals) were, and at least a third of that 15 percent, or five manuscripts a week, were outstanding. It is no exaggeration to recall that I received throughout my editorship sixty stories a month which by any standard I could ascertain were as good as or better than anything published in the competing magazines.

I was only able, because of space limitations, to buy perhaps twenty of those stories and perhaps another fifteen which were of lesser standard, which means that I rejected consciously about forty stories which were better than some I bought. 5 The word rate in all cases but that of Leiber and Disch was a penny a word on publication or shortly thereafter and all of the writers, every one of them, were glad to accept the terms. The stories were published, one of them (the Lafferty) was in a best-of-the-year collection and a couple more wound up in author collections.

The remainder vanished.

I think of this now and then, think of it in a time when the magazine market is even more constricted and when there are close to a thousand (instead of the five hundred) writers eligible for membership in the SFWA and at least some definition of professionalism. If sixty publishable short stories a month were of necessity being rejected by a bottom-line, penny-a-word market at that time, exactly what is going on now? Worlds of If and Galaxy are gone, Amazing under a new ownership is producing six issues a year (Fantastic is gone), Venture is gone, Playboy no longer does science fiction. Omni and Isaac Asimov’s have appeared, of course, but the overall market is still in debit and there are almost twice as many professional writers, to say nothing of the hordes of creative-writing majors of the seventies driven toward science fiction because the quality lit market no longer exists. And there are the usual host of science fiction fans/readers led naturally through their experience to attempt to write.

What is being lost now? How many stories in oblivion, how many careers unable to begin?

What can there be for all of these writers? The field needs—

Forget the field for the moment. We owe the field little at this point. What is the cost to these people of all of that failure and bitterness?

1980: New Jersey


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