* * *
The late Robert Sheckley was my good friend, and even my collaborator in the year before his death.
Bob had an infallible way of beating Writer’s Block He set himself an absolute minimum production of 5,000 words a day. If he couldn’t think of anything else, he told me, he’d write his name 2,500 times. And on those days he was blocked, he’d sit down and force himself to start typing. And to quote him: “By the time I’d typed ‘Robert Sheckley’ 800 or 900 times, a little subconscious editor would kick in and say ‘Fuck it, as long as you’re stuck here for another 3,300 words, you might as well write a story.’”
According to Bob, it never failed.
* * * *
E. E. “Doc” Smith was the first pro I ever met at a con. Sweet man, very fond of fandom, very accessible to anyone. I always thought his greatest invention (other than the Lens and the Lensmen) was the seasonal Ploorians. Doc’s daughter, Verna Trestrail, was a good friend, and I used to see her every year at Midwestcon and Rivercon. She once remarked that she helped her dad from time to time. So I asked how, and she replied that she had invented the Ploorians.
(Verna also invented the planet where Clarissa had to function in the nude. She told me that Doc bought a gorgeous painting of it—and Mrs. Doc took one look at it and consigned it to the attic for the next 25 years.)
* * * *
I met Robert A. Heinlein only a couple of times, at the 1976 and 1977 Worldcons, so I have no personal anecdotes to tell you about him—but Theodore Sturgeon had one. There was a point in the mid-1940s where Sturgeon was played out. He couldn’t come up with any saleable stories, his creditors were after him, and he was terminally depressed…and he mentioned it to Heinlein in a letter. A week later he got a 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