letter from Heinlein with 26 story ideas and a $100 bill to tide him over until he started selling again. And, according to Sturgeon, before the decade was over he had written and sold all 26 stories.
* * * *
I never met Fredric Brown. I know he grew up in Cincinnati, where I have lived the past 33 years, but no one here remembers meeting him. And I know he spent a lot of time working in Chicago, where I spent my first 33 years, and I never met anyone there who knew him either. But I do know he had a habit, especially when writing his mysteries (which far outnumbered his science fiction) of getting on a Greyhound bus and riding it for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles, until he had his plot worked out to the last detail. Then he’d come home, sit down, and quickly type the book he’d already written in his head while touring the countryside.
* * * *
Phil Klass (who writes as “William Tenn”) told this one on a panel I moderated at a Worldcon a few years ago.
He was dating a new girl, and he mentioned it to Ted Sturgeon when they were both living in New York. Sturgeon urged Phil to bring the girl to his apartment for dinner. He and his wife would lay out an impressive spread, and Ted would regale the girl with tales of how talented and important Phil was. Phil happily agreed.
What he didn’t know was that Ted and his then-wife were nudists. Phil and the girl walk up to the door of Ted’s apartment, Phil knocks, the door opens, and there are Ted and his wife, totally naked. They greet them and start leading them to the dining room.
Phil’s girl turns to him and whispers: “You didn’t tell me we had to dress for dinner.”
* * * *
Speaking of dinners…
At our first Worldcon, Discon I in 1963—I was 21, my still-beautiful child-bride Carol was 20—Randall Garrett invited a bunch of new writers and their spouses out for dinner—his treat. Then, during dessert, he excused himself to say something of vital importance to his agent, who was walking past the restaurant. He left the table—and we never saw him again. The rest of us got stuck with the tab (it was an expensive restaurant, we were broke kids, and Randy himself had the most expensive dish and wine on the menu.)
Move the clock ahead three years. Randy spots Carol and me at Tricon (the 1966 Worldcon in Cleveland) and offers to buy us dinner. We say sure. During dessert Carol excuses herself to go powder her nose, and I remember a phone call I have to make. We meet and walk out, leaving Randy with the tab he had promised to pay (but, according to Bob Silverberg, Bob Tucker, and others I’d spoken to before going out with him, had no intention of paying.)
Move the clock ahead one more year, and we’re at NYcon III. Opening night Randy spots me across the room, turns red in the face, and yells: “Resnick, I’m never eating dinner with you again!”
I got an ovation from every pro and fan he’d ever stuck with a dinner check.
* * * *
And let me end with one about a living writer, just to be different—my friend, recent Nebula Grandmaster Robert Silverberg.
When Bob started selling to Astounding, he wrote under the name of “Calvin M. Knox.” Some years later John Campbell asked him why. He replied that the word on the grapevine was that Campbell didn’t want Jewish names on the cover. Campbell’s reply: “Did you ever hear of Isaac Asimov?”
Then, as the conversation was drawing to a close and Bob was about to leave, Campbell asked him why of all the pseudonyms in the world he chose Calvin M. Knox. Bob replied that it was the most Christian-sounding name he could think of.
Finally, as he’s leaving, Campbell asks what the “M” stands for.
Bob’s answer: “Moses.”
* * * *
How can you not love this field?
The Greatest Thinker of Them All
Science fiction isn’t like any other field. Here we consider it an honor when someone builds on our ideas. Alfred Bester could write The Demolished Man, and then Robert Silverberg could write his answer to it in The Second Trip, and I could write my answer to Silverberg in “Me and My Shadow,” and somebody could fictionally answer me, and nobody cries foul.
It happens all the time. But there is one particular writer whose ideas have been built upon by almost every science fiction writer for three-quarters of a century—and the wild part is that not only don’t most fans know his name, but most pros who have used his notions as a springboard for their own stories and novels haven’t even read him. His idea have been so thoroughly poached and borrowed and extrapolated from and built upon that writers are now borrowing five and six times removed from the source.
So I think perhaps it’s time to tell you a little something about that source, because he science fiction’s most remarkable thinker. His name was Olaf Stapledon.
Stapledon was a college professor, a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and except for reading H. G. Wells, he probably had no idea that the field of science fiction existed. He certainly hadn’t seen the pulp magazines, and he didn’t know Hugo Gernsback’s name for it (and in fact, when he began, Gernsback was still using the original “scientifiction” rather than breaking it into two words.)
Stapledon wasn’t an elegant writer. I freely admit that his prose tends to crawl rather than soar—but his ideas soared higher than anyone else’s ever had.
His first novel was Last and First Men, which follows the human race through eighteen startling evolutions for more than two million years, until our eventual extinction. In one evolution, we’re nothing but giant brains. Later we emigrate to Venus, and eventually to Neptune, changing our bodies each time to adapt to our new environments.
Not bad for 1930. It is truly a novel of titanic concepts and sweeping vision—and it is condensed into very little more a page in his masterpiece, Star Maker, which is nothing less than the history of this and every other universe ever to exist from the beginning to the end of Time. Brian Aldiss has argued that this is the most important science fiction book ever written; I have shared that opinion from the day I finished the book more than 40 years ago.
It was in Star Maker that Stapledon explored the notion of galactic empires. He created endless races, some humanoid, some ichthyoid, some arachnoid, each with its own outlooks and morals and goals. People—well, intelligent beings, anyway—travel between the stars and ultimately even among the galaxies.
But there’s more. The stars themselves are sentient, and eventually all the sentient entities in the galaxy—men, aliens, stars, everything—merge into a single Cosmic Mind.
But Stapledon didn’t even stop there. He was interested in what created that Cosmic Mind, and became the first—and almost the only—to tackle the notion of God (i.e., the Star Maker) in a non-religious way.
It’s almost impossible to find a science fiction idea in the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s, or even the digests of the last half century, that does not owe something—usually a major something—to Stapledon. (In fact, when Larry Niven’s brilliant Ringworld came out and credited Dyson Spheres as its inspiration, I decided that that was the first truly major science fictional concept that did not owe anything to Stapledon. I should have known better. When I read Freman Dyson’s autobiography a few years later, I discovered—not surprisingly, in retrospect—that he credited Stapledon
