Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna
Darkness descends—and the cluttering towers
Of cities and hamlets blink into light.
The harsh, brilliant glitter of day's bustling hours
Gives place to the glowing effulgence of night.
The moon—that blanched creature—the queen of the sky
Peeps wistfully down at the life-forms below,
Thinking, perhaps, of the eons rolled by
Since life on her bosom lapsed under the snow.
A dead world, and cold, this satellite bleak,
Whose craters and valleys are airless and dry;
No flicker of motion from deep pit to peak;
No living thing's ego to ask, "Why am I?"
But once, ages past, this grim tomb in space
Felt bustle of life on her surface now bare,
Till Time in his flight, speeding apace,
Swept life, motion, thought away—who can know where?
I just now noticed for the first time that T. O'Conor Sloane changed the title on me. I had called it Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna. But Luna isn't a planet, and so he changed Planet to Satellite, which, to be sure, is correct . . . but I'd rather have it my way, and so I have changed it back. A thing I would never have dared when he published it. Sloane was a magnificently white-bearded patriarch, looking a lot like Boris Artzybasheff's drawing of God in the guise of George Bernard Shaw. As far as I was concerned he was God. He could say "buy" or "bounce."
When Elegy appeared, it was under the by-line of Elton Andrews. Who was Elton Andrews?
My pseudonym, that's who. You have to remember that I started writing very young. I not only had not reached the age of mature wisdom* when I began, I was barely into puberty. I had a lot of romantic, immature ideas.
One of these notions was that using a pen name was glamorous. Every one of the stories in this book appeared under some other name when first published. So did everything else I wrote for pay—with the single exception of a poem, where there was a change of editors and the new man didn't know about my quirks—until I was past thirty, by which time I had been writing professionally for nearly fifteen years. Fan mag stuff I signed my name to. Professional stories I did not.
It isn't altogether a bad idea to publish one's early work under an assumed name. It takes some pressure off. If things go badly, you can always lie out of it. But that wasn't the reason I did it. What appealed to me was the romance of the thing. I remember the fantasy very clearly. I would be sitting at the soda fountain of some candy store with a newsstand. Next to me would be somebody—some pretty girl, if possible, although in those days there weren't many pretty girls who read science fiction. She would be thumbing through the latest Wonder Stones or Astounding. Her attention would be caught by a story and, fascinated, she would read it through, while the ice cream melted in her black and white soda and the bubbles went flat. Then she would look up, still entranced, coming back slowly to the real world.
* Any day now, right? Please God?
And I would call for the check, smiling, and say, "Liked it, did you? Yes. That's one of mine."
There was another consideration affecting whose name was signed to a story, and that is that there was often some doubt about whose name belonged there.
One thing we young fans did a lot was collaborate. Don't think badly of us. It was a long time ago, in a different world. We were crazy kids, with no real roots; if from time to time we wrote with somebody else, what was the harm? I'm not ashamed to say that I collaborated with at least a dozen other persons, both male and female. It didn't seem wrong. I didn't feel that I was being promiscuous. And certainly I didn't take part, or at least very rarely took part, in the Futurian Group Writing sessions, where as many as four, five, even six or seven people took turns in writing a single story. I'm not criticizing their lifestyle; what goes on between consenting adults is their own business. It is simply that that sort of thing never attracted me except, oh goodness, possibly two or three times, at the most.
As a result of all this collaboration there exist a fair number of stories of which the authorship was in doubt, and may remain so to this day. There wasn't much to do but put pen names on them.
After a lot of thought, I have decided against including any of those collaboration stories in this book, but there were a lot of them. I collaborated with Dirk Wylie; with Doc Lowndes; with Dirk and Doc; with Cyril Kornbluth; with Cyril and Dirk, and with Cyril and Doc; with Isaac Asimov; with Leslie Perri—I do not remember all the permutations; and there was at least an equal volume of material in which I did not happen to take part involving some or all of the others.
The first actual stories I published were collaborations, with a young fan torn between music and physics as a career, named Milton A. Rothman. The stories appeared under the name of Lee Gregor. Milt did most of the writing. In fact, he wrote the whole story in first draft. Our arrangement was that he would write them, I would rewrite them and sell them and he would take the bulk of the money. We sold two stories that way, in 1938 and 1939, both to Astounding—and for nearly a quarter of a century, those were the only stories I had any part in writing that ever appeared in Astounding. I was not part of the Campbell revolution. I was in the opposing camp.
In fact, John Campbell and I were competitors. By the fall of 1939, when I was nineteen years old, I had discovered how to be sure there was at least one science-fiction editor who would look with favor on my stories: I became one.
The first story I bought from myself that was all my own was The Dweller in the Ice. I published it in Super Science Stories for January 1941, under the pseudonym of James MacCreigh.