Onward and upward

Next week, I’ll be attending the 77th World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland, which promises to be a lot of fun. Here’s my schedule as it currently stands:

• Thursday August 15, 3pm—”Current Politics Reflected in SFF”—Dr. Harvey O’Brien (M), Susan Connolly, Dr Douglas Van Belle, Alec Nevala-Lee—”SFF is probably the genre that best mirrors present day society. If we examine SFF in both visual media and books, what can we learn about current politics playing out? What might future generations surmise about us?”
• Friday August 16, 11:30am—”Continuing Relevance of Older SF”—Sue Burke (M), Alec Nevala-Lee, Aliza Ben Moha, Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman—”We are in a new millennium, a literal Brave New World. Surely much of the fiction of the 20th century no longer holds relevance? The panel will discuss the fiction of the past and how it can still be relevant in the 21st century. What lessons from older authors – such as Orwell, Asimov, Butler, Delany, Kafka, and Atwood – can we apply to our app-loaded, social media-driven age?”
• Friday August 16, 2019, 5pm—”Comparable Futurist Movements”—Alec Nevala-Lee (M), Gillian Polack, Jeanine Tullos Hennig, Shweta Taneja—”How influenced by Afrofuturism are other world futurist movements such as Sinofuturism, Nippofuturism and Gulf futurism? Do they consider themselves a part of the same futurist tradition, or separate? The panel will discuss visions of the future from world cultures, how they are influenced by the root cultures they draw from, and how (if at all) they relate to Afrofuturism.”
• Saturday August 17, 2019, 2pm—Autographing
• Monday August 19, 2019, 10am—Kaffeeklatsch
• Monday August 19, 2019, 12:30pm—Reading

I might as well also mention that Astounding is up for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work—although the rest of the ballot is extremely formidable—and that it recently came out in paperback. (This new edition is virtually identical to the hardcover, but I took the opportunity to make a few small fixes and tweaks, and as far as I’m concerned, this is the definitive version.) And if you haven’t done so already, please check out the first three episodes of the wonderful Washington Post podcast Moonrise, which heavily draws on material from the book. Hope to see some of you soon!

The Bad Pennies, Part 3

On September 4, 1964, the annual World Science Fiction Convention opened its doors at the Hotel Leamington in Oakland, California. The guests of honor included Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, and Forrest Ackerman, with Anthony Boucher serving as toastmaster, but the conversation that weekend was dominated by a fan who wasn’t there. After a heated debate, Walter H. Breen had been banned from attendance by the convention committee, for reasons that were outlined by Bill Donaho in a special fanzine issue titled “The Great Breen Boondoggle, or All Berkeley Is Plunged into War.” (The newsletter was privately circulated, and Donaho asked that it not be quoted, but the complete text can be found online.) As Donaho makes abundantly clear, it was common knowledge among local fans that Breen—who had moved to Berkeley in the fifties—was a serial abuser of children. Four cases are described in detail, with allusions to numerous others. I won’t quote them here, but they’re horrifying, both in themselves and in the length of time over which they took place. Donaho writes:

Walter’s recent behavior has been getting many Berkeley parents not just alarmed, but semi-hysterical. If Walter is in the same room with a young boy, he never takes his eyes off the kid. He’ll be semi-abstractedly talking to someone else, but his eyes will be on the boy. And if the kid goes to the bathroom, Walter gets up and follows him in…Knowing Walter I can readily believe that he was completely oblivious to the obvious signs of strong objection. Those who say Walter is a child are right and as a child he is completely oblivious to other people’s desires and wishes unless hit on the head with them.

In the meantime, the prominent fan Alva Rogers said that he felt “great reluctance” to exclude anyone from the community, and he had a novel solution to ensure the safety of his own children whenever Breen came to visit: “He wanted to protect his kids of course, but that the situation was adequately handled at his house by having them barricade themselves in their room.”

But the most unbelievable aspect of the entire story is that no one involved seems to have disputed the facts themselves. What remained a source of controversy—both before the convention and long afterward—was the appropriate action to take, if any, against Breen. As Donaho writes of the reactions of two influential fans, with the name of a child redacted:

They swung between two points of view. “We must protect T—” and “We’re all kooks. Walter is just a little kookier than the rest of us. Where will it all end if we start rejecting people because they’re kooky?” So they swung from on the one hand proposing that if Walter wasn’t to be expelled, then the banning from individual homes should be extended so that club meetings were only held in such homes, and on the other hand calling the whole series of discussions “McCarthyite” and “Star Chamber.” “I don’t want Walter around T—, but if we do such a horrible thing as expelling him, I’ll quit fandom.”

On a more practical level, some of the organizers were concerned that if they banned Breen, they would also lose Marion Zimmer Bradley, who married him shortly before the convention began. When informed of the controversy, Breen explicitly threatened to keep Bradley away, which led to much consternation. Donaho explains: “Many of us like Marion and all this is not a very pleasant welcome to Berkeley for her. Not to mention the fact that it’s going to severely strain her relations with almost all Berkeley fans, since naturally she will defend Walter…We feel that she most probably at least knows about some of Walter’s affairs with adolescent males but believes in tolerance.”

Even after the decision was made, the wounds remained raw, and many writers and fans seemed to frame the entire incident primarily in terms of its impact on the community. In the second volume of his biography In Dialogue With His Century, William H. Patterson quotes a letter that Heinlein sent to Marion Zimmer Bradley on July 15, 1965:

The fan nuisance we were subjected to was nothing like as nasty as the horrible things that were done to you two but it was bad enough that we could get nothing else done during the weeks it went on and utterly spoiled what should have been a pleasant, happy winter. But it resulted in a decision which has made our life much pleasanter already…We have cut off all contact with organized fandom. I regret that we will miss meeting some worthwhile people in the future as the result of this decision. But the percentage of poisonous jerks in the ranks of fans makes the price too high; we’ll find our friends elsewhere.

Patterson, typically, doesn’t scrutinize this statement, moving on immediately to an unrelated story about Jerry Pournelle with the transition: “Fortunately, not all their fan interactions were were so unpleasant.” His only discussion of the incident takes the form of a footnote in which he quotes “a good short discussion” of the Breendoggle from a glossary of fan terms: “The sole point fans on both sides can agree upon is that the resulting feud had long-lasting effects [and] tore the fabric of the microcosm beyond repair…The opposing forces retired to lick their wounds and assure themselves that they had been undeniably right while the other side had been unmistakably wrong.”

By now, I hope that we can arrive at another “single point” of agreement, which is that fandom, in its effort to see itself as a place of inclusiveness for the “kooks,” disastrously failed to protect Breen’s victims. In 1991, Breen was charged with eight felony counts of child molestation and sentenced to ten years in prison—which led in turn to a comparable moment of reckoning in another subculture in which he had played an even more prominent role. Breen was renowned among coin collectors as the author of such reference works as the Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins, and the reaction within the world of numismatics was strikingly similar to what had taken place a quarter of a century earlier in Berkeley. As Charles Morgan and Hubert Walker write in an excellent article in CoinWeek:

Even in 1991, with the seeming finality of a confession and a ten-year prison sentence, it was like the sci-fi dustups of the 1960s all over again. This time, however, it was coin collectors and fans of Breen’s numismatic work that came to his defense. One such defender was fellow author John D. Wright, who wrote a letter to Coin World that stated: “My friend Walter Breen has confessed to a sin, and for this, other friends of mine have picked up stones to throw at him.” Wright criticized the American Numismatic Association for revoking Breen’s membership mere weeks after awarding him the Heath Literary Award, saying that while he did not condone Breen’s “lewd and lascivious acts,” he did not see the charge, Breen’s guilty plea or subsequent conviction as “reason for expulsion from the ANA or from any other numismatic organization.”

It’s enough to make you wonder if anything has changed in the last fifty years—but I think that it has. And the best example is the response to a more recent series of revelations about the role of Marion Zimmer Bradley. I’ll dive into this in greater detail tomorrow, in what I hope will be my final post on the subject.

The happy golden years

A few months ago, the American Library Association announced that it was renaming the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, which has been awarded annually for over six decades for merit in children’s literature. (The decision was reached at the association’s summer conference in New Orleans, which I attended, although I was only vaguely aware of the discussion at the time.) In a joint statement explaining the move, which was primarily motivated by the “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in [Wilder’s] work,” the presidents of the ALA and the Association for Library Service to Children were careful to distinguish between the value of her legacy and the message sent by institutionalizing it in this particular form:

Although Wilder’s work holds a significant place in the history of children’s literature and continues to be read today, ALSC has had to grapple with the inconsistency between Wilder’s legacy and its core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness through an award that bears Wilder’s name…This change should not be viewed as a call for readers to change their personal relationship with or feelings about Wilder’s books. Updating the award’s name should not be construed as censorship, as we are not demanding that anyone stop reading Wilder’s books, talking about them, or making them available to children. We hope adults think critically about Wilder’s books and the discussions that can take place around them.

This seems reasonable enough, although Wilder’s biographer, Caroline Fraser, argues in an opinion piece for the Washington Post that the decision evokes “the anodyne view of literature” that the ALA has elsewhere tried to overcome. Fraser concludes: “Whether we love Wilder or hate her, we should know her. “

For reasons of my own, I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot recently. Last week at Worldcon, a critic who had recently finished reading Astounding commented that he wasn’t sure he would have wanted to meet any of its subjects, and I know what he means. (If I had the chance to spend time with a single person from the book, I might well choose Doña Campbell, or possibly Leslyn Heinlein, if only because I’d learn more from them than I would from any of the others.) I didn’t go into this project with any preexisting agenda in mind, but I emerged with a picture of these four writers that is often highly critical. John W. Campbell’s importance to the history of science fiction is indisputable, and I wrote this biography largely to bring his achievements to the attention of a wider audience. He also expressed views that were unforgivably racist, both in private conversation and in print, and he bears part of the blame for limiting the genre’s diversity, which is an issue that we’re still struggling to address today. I think that Robert A. Heinlein is the best and most significant writer that the genre ever produced, but I’m not sure I would have wanted to be the the same room with him for very long. Hubbard, obviously, is a special case. And perhaps the most difficult reckoning involves Isaac Asimov, a writer who meant a lot to me—and to countless others—growing up, but whose treatment of women looks increasingly awful over time. It was hard for me to write about this, and I expect that it will be hard for many others to read it. It’s safe to say that many fans made up their minds about Heinlein and Hubbard years ago, while this book will introduce Campbell to a larger readership for the first time in what I hope will be his full complexity. With Asimov, however, I suspect that many readers will need to revise their understanding of a man they admired and thought they knew, and that might be the hardest part of all.

At the convention, I conducted what I saw as a trial run for discussing these issues in public, and the results were often enlightening. (Among other things, I found that whenever I brought up Asimov’s behavior, many fans would start to silently nod. It’s common knowledge within fandom—it just hasn’t been extensively discussed in print.) At my roundtable, an attendee raised the question of how we can separate an artist’s life from the work, which prompted someone else to respond: “Well, we choose to separate it.” And third person nervously hoped that no one was suggesting that we stop reading these authors altogether. On the individual level, this is clearly a matter of conscience, as long as we each take the trouble of engaging with it honestly. Collectively speaking, it isn’t always clear. Occasionally, the community will reach a consensus without too much trouble, as it did with Hubbard, which is about as easy as this sort of decision gets. More often, it’s closer to what we’ve seen with Wilder. As Fraser notes: “While the answer to racism is not to impose purity retroactively or to disappear titles from shelves, no eight-year-old Dakota child should have to listen to an uncritical reading of Little House on the Prairie. But no white American should be able to avoid the history it has to tell.” In a New York Times article on the controversy, the scholar Debbie Reese makes a similar point more forcefully: “People are trying to use [these books] and say, ‘Well, we can explain them,’ and I say: ‘Okay, you’re trying to explain racism to white people. Good for those white kids.’ But what about the Native and the black kids in the classroom who have to bear with the moment when they’re being denigrated for the benefit of the white kids?” If nothing else, renaming the award sends a clear message that this conversation needs to take place. It’s manifestly the first step, not the last.

Which brings me to John W. Campbell. In 1973, two years after the editor’s death, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer—which is given out annually at the Hugo Awards—was inaugurated by the World Science Fiction Society, along with the Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. I don’t know how this biography will be received, but it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if it led to a wider debate about Campbell, his views on race, and whether his name ought to be attached to an award whose list of recent recipients stands as a testament to the genre’s range of voices. For now, I’ll only say that if Laura Ingalls Wilder can inspire this sort of discussion, then Campbell absolutely should. If it happens, I don’t know what the outcome will be. But I will say that while Campbell absolutely deserves to be remembered, it may not need to be in this sort of institutionalized form. In the Post, Fraser writes:

If the books are to be read and taught today—and it’s hard to escape them given their popularity—then teachers, librarians and parents are going to have to proceed armed with facts and sensitivity…I’d like to think that what would matter to Wilder in this debate would be not the institutionalized glory of an award bearing her name but the needs of children. “I cannot bear to disappoint a child,” she once said.

Campbell, to be frank, might well have welcomed the “institutionalized glory” of such an award. But he also wanted to be taken seriously. As Fraser says about Wilder, we can love or hate him, but we should know him. And a discussion about the future of the Campbell Award may well end up being the price that has to be paid for restoring him—and the entire golden age—to something more than just a name.

The best of youth

At some point, as I was preparing for last week’s World Science Fiction Convention, I realized that there was a good chance that I would run out of books. This wasn’t a problem that I ever expected to have. Astounding isn’t due to come out for another two months, and the hardcovers aren’t available yet, but in the meantime, my publisher printed up a bunch of advance copies, or galleys, which we’ve been sending to reviewers, media outlets, and everyone else we might want to reach. The number of galleys is relatively large, but not unlimited, and about a month ago, I began to hear rumblings that we were coming up short. (One issue is that we sent a hundred copies to Comic-Con, which sounds awesome in theory, although I wish that we’d saved them for Worldcon, which is much closer to this book’s target audience.) After scrambling to get copies from various departments, I ended up with two dozen galleys that could be spared for San Jose, which I supplemented with a stack from my stash at home. Some of these ended up being handed out at a booth run by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, while I set aside ten others for attendees at my roundtable and for a few special recipients. As a result, I was left with just six copies to give away at my reading, which drew a sizable turnout. Since I couldn’t give a copy to everyone, I had to think of ways to distribute the ones that I had, and it occurred to me to give a book to the youngest person in the room. Toward the end, I looked out at the audience and said, “Raise your hand if you’re under thirty.” And in a crowd of over one hundred people, exactly two hands shot up.

I had much the same experience at my other events, at which I saw perhaps half a dozen people who were under thirty years old. In nearly every case, I was among the youngest people in the room. (As far as I know, I attracted just one audience member across the entire week who was under twenty. He showed up to my second event, and I didn’t get his name, but if he’s reading this now, I’d like to hear from him. I think he deserves a copy, too.) Two years ago, after MidAmeriCon II in Kansas City, I wrote a blog post noting that I kept seeing the same fifty faces at my panels. I was aware that the average age at Worldcon has long been higher than that at similar gatherings, but it still felt as if I were spending the weekend at a convention within the convention—an enclave in which a vibrant but graying crowd was gathering to celebrate writers, stories, and a shared history that the larger community was beginning to forget. Now that more time has passed, it feels even more true today. Fandom is inexorably growing older. We’ve recently lost important personalities, such as Gardner Dozois and Harlan Ellison, who had embodied much of its institutional memory. And it isn’t clear whether new voices are emerging to replace the old ones. While I was in San Jose, I made time to meet up with a few younger writers whom I happen to know, and I saw a few familiar faces in the hallways, but for the most part, I spent the week at a slight remove from the authors and fans who looked like me, or who come from approximately the same generation. And as I’ve noted before, I occasionally have trouble making the case that they should take an interest in a book about these four writers.

But I’m not going to talk about that problem here, or lament the generational divide, if one even exists, within science fiction. Instead, I wanted to raise two points that I’ve only gradually been able to admit to myself, but which seem relevant to talking about this book and how it happened to emerge. The first is that I’m naturally more comfortable among older writers than I am among those my own age. I could explain this by saying that my interests tend to skew older anyway, which is true enough, but that isn’t the real reason. If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that it’s a defense mechanism—I feel so competitive around other writers my age that I can never fully relax around them, particularly if we’re at a similar point in our careers. It’s an aspect of my personality that I don’t love, and I’ve tried to get past it, but in the meantime, I tend to have a better time with writers who are at a different stage than I am, even if they’ve accomplished more than I ever will. The other key point is that I like being among the younger people in the room, and there’s a part of me that wants to extend that feeling for as long as possible. My choice of subject wasn’t consciously motivated by this, but I can’t rule it out. I’m often asked why someone my age would take an interest in this period, and I never get tired of the question, because the number of fields at which I can come across as a wunderkind is rapidly diminishing. If I were publishing my first novel, any interviews or profiles would make a point of describing me as a late bloomer, and if I were trying to break into screenwriting, I might actively lie about my age. I’m not even particularly young when it comes to literary nonfiction. But the golden age of science fiction offers a kind of optical illusion that makes me seem like more of a prodigy than I really am.

My point, I guess, is that a writer’s choice of subject is necessarily motivated by personal ambition, even by vanity, as well as by what the market will bear. (When people ask why I wrote a book about John W. Campbell, I respond, honestly enough, that he fascinates me—but I was also ambitious enough to grab a huge unexplored subject as soon as I saw that it might be possible for me to lay claim to it.) I may look out of place at these events, but that’s how I like it. Like many writers, I’m an outsider who longs in secret to be an insider, while still proclaiming my own difference, and I happened to stumble into a subject where this was still possible. Fortunately, I think that it also resulted in a good book, and one that nobody else could have written in quite the same way. From a marketing perspective, it doesn’t hurt that I look slightly different from its four central subjects, and the fact that I came at it from the outside allowed me to approach in ways that wouldn’t be possible for a lifelong fan. I’m obviously far from an unbiased critic of the result, but I do believe that this book benefited from being written from a place of detachment. Yet it was also born of my desire to find a big topic to tackle, as well as to earn a place in that room. Scratch the surface of any book, or a creative project of any kind, and you’ll find similar motivations. I might not have conceived of this project at all if I were the kind of writer who could feel at home anywhere else, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it again. But if there’s one thing that I took away from Worldcon this year, it’s that the room where I seemed most out of place is also the only one in which I wanted to belong.

The Way from San Jose

I just got home from the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, which was an exhausting, enlightening, and mostly wonderful experience. My primary objective, not surprisingly, was to get out the word about my book Astounding, which was originally scheduled to come out last Tuesday, or the day before the convention began. At the last minute, my publisher—for perfectly valid reasons—pushed back its release date by two months, so instead of flying in with boxes of finished hardcovers for sale, I had to do what I could with a few advance copies, some promotional swag, and myself. And I wasn’t sure how it would go. Half an hour before my first event, at which I would be talking about the book on my own for fifty minutes, I told myself that if twenty audience members showed up, I’d be happy. (I was even ready with a funny remark in case only four or five of my friends appeared, which has happened at readings I’ve done in the past.) When I finally arrived at my assigned room, there were already attendees waiting outside the entrance to get in. Every seat was filled. There were people standing at the edges of the room and seated on the floor. I was blown away, and the event went great. It was only afterward that I reflected that if there’s one time and place in the world where I should be able to draw a crowd for a book like this, it was last Thursday at the San Jose Convention Center. It’s still the center of science fiction fandom, especially for an older generation, and it’s where this project was born. Looking back, I see now that if I hadn’t been able to fill the room, or if only half the chairs had been occupied, it would have been a very bad sign. And the fact that it went well is at best a neutral indicator for how it will fare in the world beyond Worldcon.

But I can’t deny that I was gratified and moved by the response. In the days that followed, I held a casual roundtable with readers and moderated a panel on John W. Campbell featuring Robert Silverberg, Greg and Astrid Bear, Joe Haldeman, and Stanley Schmidt, which also drew a sizable crowd—although I wasn’t really worried about that one. I also had a good time tracking down people in the lobby and at parties, and I heard a lot of kind words from attendees who were looking forward to the book. (My five-year-old daughter, pictured above, also had fun. She spent most of the trip with my parents and my very understanding wife while I ran around to various events, but I brought her by the convention center a few times. One of the high points of my life was when she met Silverberg, which I hope will someday feel like a historical moment in itself.) But it also left me with a host of unanswered questions about this project, its subjects, and its future. I interacted with hundreds of enthusiastic fans about this book, but only a handful were under thirty. At my first event, I took questions for half an hour, and the majority weren’t about Campbell, Asimov, or Heinlein, but Hubbard, which points to an untapped interest in his career as a science fiction writer that I hadn’t entirely anticipated. For most of the last two years, I’ve been thinking about how the unpleasant aspects of a writer’s personal life can affect how we read the work, and the convention turned into something of a trial run to see how these problems play out in public, with mixed results. I’m still trying to sort out my own thoughts, but over the next few days, I’ll do what I can to work through some of the issues that I took away from San Jose.

Changing the future

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction is now scheduled to be released on October 23, 2018. It was originally slated for August 14, but my publisher recently raised the possibility of pushing it back, and we agreed on the new date earlier this week. Why the change? Well, it’s a good thing. This is a big book—by one estimate, we’re looking at close to five hundred pages, including endnotes, back matter, and index—and it needs time to be edited, typeset, and put into production. We could also use the extra nine weeks to get it into bookstores and into the hands of reviewers, and rescheduling it for the fall puts us in a better position. The one downside, at least from my point of view, is that now we’ll be coming out in a corridor that is always packed with major releases, and it’s going to be challenging for us to stand out. (It’s also just two weeks before the midterm elections, and I’m worried about how much bandwidth readers will have to think about anything else.) But everybody involved seems to think that we can handle it, and I have no reason to doubt their enthusiasm or expertise.

In short, if you’ve been looking forward to reading Astounding, you’ll have to wait two months longer. (Apart from an upcoming round of minor edits, by the way, the book is basically finished.) In the meantime, at the end of this month, I’m attending the academic conference “Grappling With the Futures” at Harvard and Boston University, where I’ll be delivering a presentation on the evolution of psychohistory alongside the scholar Emmanuelle Burton. The July/August issue of Analog will feature “The Campbell Machine,” a modified excerpt from the book, including a lot of material that won’t appear anywhere else, about one of the most significant incidents in John W. Campbell’s life—the tragic death of his stepson, which encouraged his interest in psionics and culminated in his support of the Hieronymus Machine. And I’m hopeful that a piece about Campbell’s role in the development of dianetics will appear elsewhere in the fall. I’ve also confirmed that I’ll be a program participant at the upcoming World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, which runs from August 16 to 20. At one point, I’d planned to have the book in stores by then, which isn’t quite how it worked out. But if you run into me there, ask me for a copy. If I have one handy, it’s yours.

In times to come

It’s been a quiet few months on the book front, but I wanted to quickly bring everything up to date as I enter the home stretch. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction—and yes, as far as I know, that’s the final title—is now officially scheduled to be released on August 14, 2018. Not coincidentally, that’s just two days before the seventy-sixth World Science Fiction Convention begins in San Jose, California. I plan to be there, and I hope to see some of you who are reading this now. (At the very least, I intend to appear on a few panels, possibly do a talk, and attend as many other events as I can.)

I’m also delighted to share the cover design, which represents the remarkable work of artist Tavis Coburn and art director Ploy Siripant. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that this is frighteningly close to the dust jacket of my dreams—it evokes the spirit of the pulp era without being too campy or garish, and it draws inspiration from perhaps the most elegant and timeless incarnation of the original magazine. I’ve spent what feels like hours looking at this cover, and my goal at the moment is to deliver a draft that lives up to it. The manuscript is due on December 4, which, when I first announced this project a year and a half ago, seemed impossibly far away. Now I’ve got just four weeks. But the future always comes sooner than you expect.

MidAmeriCon Episode II: The Sequel

When the World Science Fiction Convention was last held in Kansas City, Missouri, the guest of honor was Robert A. Heinlein, the Hugo Award for Best Novel went to Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and producer Gary Kurtz and actor Mark Hamill were on hand to promote an upcoming movie that was still billed by many sources as The Star Wars. In August, when the convention returns to Kansas City for the first time in thirty years, I’ll be there. To be fair, Haldeman and Kurtz will also be back, along with the likes of George R.R. Martin, and the fact that I get to attend this particular year seems like an auspicious sign. It’s Heinlein’s hometown, for one thing, and because it’s so close to the University of Kansas, it means that the annual Campbell Conference—an academic gathering named after you know who—will occur at the same time.

Last week, I received a draft schedule of my events, and it looks fantastic. I’m especially pleased by the presentation I’m set to deliver as part of the academic track on Thursday, August 18, at 4pm. Here’s the abstract of “Deadline: John W. Campbell in World War II”:

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, turned down the chance to enlist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard with Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov. Instead, he forwarded defense ideas from his authors to Murray Leinster at the Office of War Information; ran the writing factory that cranked out classified sonar manuals at the Empire State Building; brainstormed responses to the kamikaze threat with Theodore Sturgeon and L. Ron Hubbard; and was investigated by the military for publishing a description of an atomic bomb over a year before Hiroshima changed science fiction—and the world—forever.

It’s a dry run for much of the material that I hope to cover in my book, and I couldn’t be more excited to present it. My other events include:

Writers of the Past: Retro Hugos in Perspective. Wednesday, August 17 at 4pm. Seeing the nominees for this year’s Retro Hugo awards brings a flood of recognition and familiarity for some, and a blank look from others. Join us and find out about the professional authors of the period, and the context for the year 1941. Who was just starting out? Who were the Grandmasters of the day? Which giants in the field were still journeymen in those days? Why are they still important? Moderator: Bradford Lyau. Panelists: Alec Nevala-Lee, Shahid Mahmud.

Remembering the Futurians. Thursday, August 18 at 1pm. Jack Robins, who died last year, was a founding member of the Futurians. The Futurians were instrumental in not only laying the groundwork for many fannish traditions, but also included the authors of many of the seminal works in the field from Asimov to Pohl, Kidd, and others. Let’s take a look back at their influence during a magical era when the future of science fiction and fandom was taking off. Moderator: Mark L. Olson. Panelists: Alec Nevala-Lee, Pete Balestrieri, Scott Edelman.

Do Heinlein Juveniles Stand Up? Thursday, August 18 at 2pm. Robert A. Heinlein published 12 books between 1947 and 1958 that were aimed at young adults, predominantly in the male SF market. Although many older fans have a tremendous regard and nostalgic glow for Heinlein’s juveniles, can children today enjoy them or do they seem hopelessly dated? Let’s take a dive into these books and cast an appreciative yet critical eye over them. Moderator: Dr. Janice M. Bogstad. Panelists: Brendan DuBois, Dr. Marie Guthrie, Dr. Michael Levy, Alec Nevala-Lee.

Old Time Radio and New Tales in the Age of Podcasts. Thursday, August 18 at 5pm. The classic era of radio saw science fiction shows X Minus One, Stroke of Fate, Dimension X, and others. Podcasts often use classic storytelling since many other tales from the era of Weird Fiction are out of copyright; however, there are other, newer stories that lend themselves extremely well to podcast readings. The panel discuss old and new ways of using podcasting to tell classic stories well, and bring new stories to life. Moderator: Julia Rios. Panelists: Jim Freund, David Truesdale, Alec Nevala-Lee, Tamora Pierce.

Classics in the Corner. Friday, August 19 at 11am. So much new fiction is being published, both traditionally and self-published, that nobody can read it all. But is anyone still reading the classics from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s or are they just filling up space on the shelf? Why should or shouldn’t we continue to read them, especially when they make us wince with sexist and racist language? Has the move toward diversity and inclusion reduced our tolerance for different eras, even when reading with a critical eye? Moderator: Don Sakers. Panelists: John Hertz, James Minz, Betsy Mitchell, Alec Nevala-Lee.

Techno-Thrillers. Saturday, August 20 at 5pm. Techno-thrillers can be an exciting blend of literary genres that combine science fiction, crime drama, spy stories, thrillers, etc. They can be set in outter space or take place here on Earth in the not-so-distant future. What makes them special? What sets them apart? And are they dressed up space operas? Moderator: Toni L.P. Kelner. Panelists: Greg Bear, Edward M. Lerner, P.J. Manney, Alec Nevala-Lee.

If that weren’t enough, I’m also going to be taking part in a group reading on Friday, August 19 at 12pm featuring authors from Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Editor Trevor Quachri will be there, along with former editor Stanley Schmidt and writers Ken Liu, James Van Pelt, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, and yours truly. (I’m hoping to read a page or two from my upcoming novella “The Proving Ground.”) All told, it promises to be a great weekend, and if you’re planning to attend, please drop me a line or keep an eye out for me when you’re there: I’m eager to meet and listen to everyone who wants to chat about the past and future of science fiction, the four writers featured in my book, or really anything at all. And if we’re lucky, MidAmeriCon II will be one of the few sequels that lives up to the hype. 

Nebulas and other news

I’ll be spending most of today and tomorrow at the Nebula Conference here in Chicago, which I’m delighted to be attending for the first time. After postponing it for years for no particular reason, I recently became a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and I’m looking forward to taking a more active role in the community, starting right now. In particular, I’m moderating a discussion this afternoon on the legacy of John W. Campbell with a fantastic slate of panelists: Stanley Schmidt of Analog, Sheila Williams of Asimov’s, and Joe Haldeman, the legendary author of The Forever War. I’m also participating in a panel tomorrow titled “Western Narratives,” along with Jennifer Cross, Mikki Kendall, and Michi Trota. And I couldn’t be more excited to attend the Nebula Banquet and Award Ceremony—hosted by toastmaster John Hodgman—later that night. I hope to see a few readers of this blog there, and I’ll be posting about my experiences at the conference on Monday.

This also seems like a good time to round up a few other brief announcements and news items, since the next few months are going to be especially eventful. My short story “Ernesto” is being reprinted in an upcoming issue of Lightspeed Magazine, and I’ve just received the excellent news that my climate change novella “The Proving Ground,” the first story I’ve ever attempted at that length, has been picked up by Analog. I’ve also written a radio play for an episode of the new science fiction podcast The Outer Reach, which will debut this summer as part of the Howl podcasting network, and I hope to have more information about this soon. Best of all, I’ll be attending MidAmeriCon II this August in Kansas City, where I’m scheduled to deliver a presentation on John W. Campbell and his work during World War II in the academic track at the Campbell Conference. It’s going to be quite a year, and we aren’t even halfway done with it yet—so please stay tuned for more.

An astounding announcement

I’m very pleased to announce that Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, has agreed to publish my nonfiction book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. This project has been in the works for a long time, and if I haven’t mentioned it here before, it was mostly out of a superstitious aversion to talking about it before I knew for sure that it was going to happen—but now it looks like it is. We’re still hashing out a few details, including the timeline for delivery and publication, although I suspect that it won’t be in stores until around the first half of 2018. And everything from the title to the release date is subject to change. What isn’t in doubt, thankfully, is that I’ll finally have the chance to write the book that I’ve been mulling over for most of the last year: the definitive account, I hope, of how modern science fiction, along with so much else, emerged from the personalities and lives of four flawed but remarkable writers whose careers intersected in unbelievable ways. It’s a jaw-dropping story that I expect to discuss at length on this blog in the months and years to come. And I’m incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to bring it to a wider readership.

This isn’t the place to talk about the book in depth, but I should probably say something about its origins. As longtime readers will know, I’ve been fortunate enough to place stories on a regular basis in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Analog, once known as Astounding, is the oldest continuously published science fiction magazine in the world—it recently celebrated its thousandth issue—and it’s impossible to write for it for long without reflecting on its history. My thoughts came to focus on Campbell, who is one of the most important, and enigmatic, figures in the popular culture of the twentieth century. Campbell wrote the classic novella “Who Goes There?,” which has been adapted three times as The Thing; he gave up writing at the age of twenty-seven to take the helm of Astounding, where he discovered or developed Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and countless other major writers, laying down most of the rules for modern science fiction along the way; he collaborated closely with L. Ron Hubbard on the therapy that became known as dianetics, and was its greatest promoter and champion before falling out with the future founder of Scientology; he edited the first version of Dune; and despite his massive influence, by the end of his life, his political, social, and scientific views had estranged him from many of his former fans. The Three Laws of Robotics and Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health both came from the same place. And the real question is why.

Campbell, in short, is more than worthy of a book on his own, and the fact that there has never been a full-length biography devoted to his life astonished me, as it still does now. (As I shopped around the proposal, I kept thinking of what Lin-Manuel Miranda once said: “What’s the thing that’s not in the world that should be in the world?” And a Campbell biography abundantly qualifies.) When I began this project, my goal was to give Campbell the book that he deserved, and it still is, although its scope has widened considerably from what I originally conceived. Campbell remains at the center, but when you expand that circle slightly outward, the first three names that fall within its circumference are Asimov, Heinlein, and Hubbard, whose lives he touched in profound ways. Unlike Campbell, these three writers have already been the subjects of exhaustive memoirs or biographies. But focusing on the points where their lives collided—particularly over the fifteen-year period that starts with Campbell assuming the editorship of Astounding in 1937, runs through World War II, and concludes with the publication of Dianetics—reveals fascinating patterns and parallels. Each man, for instance, was deeply changed by the atomic bomb and the Cold War, and each underwent a traumatic divorce and remarriage at a hinge point in his career. And their wives, whose roles in the history of science fiction have often been overlooked, will play a crucial part in this story.

In any event, I hope to continue covering as wide a range of topics on this blog as always, but you shouldn’t be surprised if the emphasis shifts ever so slightly toward science fiction, particularly as I prepare to discuss the subject more often in public. (I’m currently scheduled to talk about Campbell at the Nebula Conference in Chicago in May, and I hope to do the same at the World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City in August.) And I wouldn’t have tackled this project in the first place if I didn’t believe that it would seize the imaginations of readers who have never cracked a science fiction magazine. Campbell and his writers shaped our inner lives in ways that can be hard to appreciate today, when science fiction seems so inevitable. In fact, it was the result of many specific choices, often made by Campbell himself, and such conventions as the central role of manned space exploration are less a prediction about the future than a narrative strategy that arose from a particular place and time. And Campbell’s fingerprints are visible on everything from Star Trek to the recent controversy over the Hugo Awards. Teasing out those connections and relating them to the ongoing debates within the genre—which is a canary in the mineshaft for the larger culture—is going to be the pivot around which my life revolves for the next two years. I’ll have more updates soon. And I couldn’t be happier that I can share it with you here first, or more astounded that I get to do it at all.

Are you a gardener or an architect?

There are many different kinds of writers. I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners. There are some writers who are architects, and they plan everything, they blueprint everything, and they know before the drive the first nail into the first board what the house is going to look like…And then there are gardeners who dig a little hole and drop a seed in and water it with their blood and see what comes up, and sort of shape it…I am much more a gardener than an architect.

That’s George R.R. Martin talking, and if my experience this weekend at Worldcon is any indication, the distinction between literary gardeners and architects may be Martin’s most lasting contribution to the way we think about writing. Of the ten or so events on writing I attended, either as a viewer or a panelist, I’d say that the gardener/architect distinction came up in at least half, usually to appreciative murmurs from the audience. Either approach, the speakers were quick to say, is perfectly fine, depending on the writer’s methods and personality—which is certainly true. But I also noticed that nearly every writer who brought up the distinction identified himself as a gardener, with an implicit sense that architects are slightly inhuman technicians whose left-brained approach can deprive them of the happy accidents of character and incident that lie at the heart of writing.

Well, in case it isn’t abundantly clear by now, I’m an architect. My first blog post was called “Nails and Houses.” My favorite book on storytelling of any kind, David Mamet’s On Directing Film, abounds in architectural metaphors, and I seized every chance I could to recommend it at my panels this weekend. (I have a feeling I sold more copies of Mamet’s book than any of my own work.) I’ve used a lot of different metaphors to describe outlining, which I’ve called a stealth first draft and compared to the relationship that a screenplay bears to a finished movie, but perhaps it’s most accurate to say that the outline is a blueprint. At this point, I wouldn’t dream of starting a substantial writing project without an outline for at least the first major section, and I still believe that having an outline often makes the difference between finishing a project and ending up with a few tantalizing fragments. And while I’m aware that this approach doesn’t work for everyone, it works so well for me that I’ve discussed it at length, both on this blog and elsewhere.

What needs to be emphasized, however, is that a novel is not a house, however seductive that analogy may be. It’s easier to remodel, for one thing. And it can be planned and built in increments: I never outline an entire novel at once, but always leave a residue of plot and character problems unresolved at every stage. In some ways, the architectural approach to writing is less like building a house than like city planning: it involves many connected structures, built over time and for different reasons, each one of which subtly changes its neighbors and the surrounding landscape. Just as a healthy neighborhood consists, according to Christopher Alexander, of the coordination of patterns scaled to human needs, writing a novel is about orchestrating many self-contained pieces—beats, scenes, chapters—into a harmonious whole. And the result, if you’ve done it properly, is less a city like Brasilia, with its structure imposed from the top down, than London, which makes sense on the ground but also reveals surprising patterns when seen from above.

And what I’ve discovered about these architectural habits is that they’re very much like what Mamet says about his own methods: applied correctly, they set the imagination free. As a blueprint, an outline helps you organize materials and find places for elements that otherwise might be lost. I’m much more likely, for instance, to remember and utilize the free-floating fragments of inspiration that come at odd moments—while shaving, showering, or taking a walk—when I have a larger structure in which they can fit. This requires a certain amount of flexibility, of course, and a willingness to revise in light of new developments. Even when I’m working out a carefully structured plan on the page, I’m often surprised by unexpected plot or character turns, which emerge, not in spite of the pattern that surrounds them, but because of it. That tension between structure and serendipity is one of the great joys of writing. And fortunately, with a novel, it’s always possible to remodel, rebuild, and, when necessary, demolish.

Goodbye, Worldcon; Goodbye, Stanley

What can you say about something like Worldcon? It’s only been over for a day or two, and I already miss it. For much of the past weekend, I’ve felt like I was practically living at the Hyatt Regency, even though I still went back home to Oak Park every night—which makes me feel as though I only got half the experience, since so much of the life of the convention clearly takes place sometime between midnight and four in the morning. And after telling myself that this was likely to be my first and last convention, I’m already starting to wonder when I can come back. (San Antonio next year probably isn’t in the cards, but London in 2014 is awfully tempting.) I went in looking forward mostly to my own panels, but emerged having learned a great deal more than I managed to convey to anyone else, not just about writing, but about speculative fiction, fandom, and the ties that bind them together.

I’ll have a chance to talk more about my panels on this blog in the future, and it was a real pleasure to meet writers like Jay Lake, Stephen Leigh, Vylar Kaftan, Russell Davis, and so many others. The real fun, however, came in attending other events, sometimes almost by accident. My favorite was the panel “Media Tie-In Novels: Art or Commerce,” in which such authors as David Gerrold and Peter David traded war stories, both good and bad, about the curious and often undervalued work of writing movie, television, and gaming tie-ins. (Game designer Tom Dowd had kind words for Vonda N. McIntyre’s novelization of Wrath of Khan, which I picked up later that day in the Dealers Room.) And of course the Hugo Awards were great fun: I got to chat with Locus reviewer Rich Horton and root for my favorite nominees, and while Community didn’t win, I was especially glad to see Kij Johnson win Best Novella for her wonderful “The Man Who Bridged the Mist.”

Yet the most significant moment of this year’s Worldcon was highly personal. Much earlier, I’d received an invitation for a special event sponsored by Analog, which I wanted to attend in any case, but it wasn’t until Friday that I learned the real reason behind it: the retirement, after thirty-four years, of editor Stanley Schmidt, with the highly capable managing editor Trevor Quachri taking the helm of the most legendary magazine in science fiction. At the event, Stan received heartfelt tributes from Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s, and writers whose names I’ve seen in print countless times, all gathered in the same crowded room. I hadn’t seen Stan in person in almost four years—we had lunch, oddly enough, on the day of Obama’s inauguration—and I’m grateful I had the chance to thank him myself and meet his charming wife Joyce. I had to run home soon thereafter, but I heard that the party ran past two in the morning.

And it isn’t surprising: we all owe Stan a lot. He was the first editor to ever buy a story I’d written—my novelette “Inversus,” which appeared in the January/February 2004 issue of Analog—and that first sale, which came out of the blue, was one of the great turning points of my life: it was my first concrete evidence that I might actually become a professional writer one day, and I’m sure there were many other authors there that night who could say the same thing. Since then, I’ve sold Stan a number of other stories, not all of which he accepted the first time around, and it’s safe to say that I wouldn’t be at Worldcon at all if he hadn’t picked up “The Boneless One.” His support has been important to me in ways I can’t even begin to express, which is why I was so glad to see him get a standing ovation at the Hugos on Sunday—the biggest reception of the night. He deserves it.

Dispatches from Chicon 7

If you happen to wander into the lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Chicago this weekend, the first thing you’re likely to notice is an abundance of Indiana Jones hats. From time to time, you’ll also see a few Yoda ears and Starfleet uniforms. You’ll also encounter a lot of guys who look startlingly like George R.R. Martin—including George R.R. Martin himself. But most of all, you’ll find a large crowd of rather peculiar people, superficially ordinary at first glance, who nonetheless seem somehow different from those you generally encounter around the Chicago Loop. It’s hard to pin down what sets fans apart, or why, as I approached the hotel, I kept noticing people, otherwise nondescript, who I just knew were going to the same place that I was. But if you spend enough time at the World Science Fiction Convention, you start to develop a sixth sense—or, in this crowd, maybe a seventh or eighth sense—for this kind of thing. And the overall feeling is exhilarating.

You could sense the diversity of the convention just by looking around the table at the New Writers panel I attended. There was moderator S.J. Chambers, who went from an editorial job at Strange Horizons to a Hugo nomination for The Steampunk Bible; Thomas Olde Heuvelt, a wunderkind who once found himself, to his chagrin, being billed at a convention as “the Horror Hunk”; Emma Newman, who got into Oxford with the help of a science-fiction story and then took a break from writing for ten years, only to return with a vengeance; Hanna Martine, a Chicago-area mom who switched from epic fantasy to paranormal romance after growing tired of the former’s lack of sex; and yours truly, who did his best to explain why he was attending a science-fiction convention with a book like The Icon Thief. (Later, one of the attendees advised me that, with this crowd, I was better off leading with my appearance in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and leaving my novels out of it.)

One of the things I love about Chicon so far is how funky it is. This isn’t a slick event like Comic-Con with a ton of media coverage, but an event for fans by fans. The big celebrities aren’t movie stars or directors, but the likes of Robert Silverberg—although I hear that Dan Harmon might make an appearance at the Hugo Awards on Sunday. This is a convention whose earliest incarnations were attended by the likes of Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury, whose names are still invoked with awe and affection. And that sense of continuity is everywhere you look. Its spirit might best be expressed by the appearance at the opening ceremony of Erle Korshak, who, at the age of seventeen, was the secretary at the very first Chicon, held on September 1, 1940. When asked how it felt to be at this year’s convention, Korshak replied: “It makes me glad that I’m still alive.”

And while the convention itself has grown much larger over time—about five thousand people are scheduled to attend this year—it still feels charmingly old-fashioned. One of my favorite things about literary science fiction is how low-tech it tends to be: it’s no accident that its most venerable magazine is called Analog, which just began accepting electronic submissions last year, and whose editor only recently stopped sending out typewritten acceptance letters. Fandom was built on mimeographed fanzines, electronic bulletin boards, and Geocities pages, and despite a well-designed convention app, the Chicon website itself has a pleasingly dated feel. The great thing about science fiction is that its finest practitioners didn’t need access to the technology of the future in order to write about it. They just needed a pencil and a dream—and when you look around this convention, it’s hard not to conclude that their dreams were larger as a result.

Note: Today at Chicon at 3:00 pm, I’ll be appearing on the panel “Turning Ideas Into Stories,” also featuring authors Tim Akers, Roland Green, Louise Marley, and Jamie Todd Rubin. This is going to be a good one!

The Chicon Thief

Regular readers will know that I envy the world of passionate fans, even if I’ve generally found myself on the outside looking in. As a result, I’ve always been fascinated by the culture of science fiction and fantasy conventions, but I’ve never had a chance to attend in person, partially because I don’t identify strongly with any particular fandom—aside from that of The X-Files, which seems to be on the wane these days—and because my own weird obsessions have tended to take me in a rather different direction. In less than two weeks, however, I’ll be attending the 70th World Science Fiction Convention here in Chicago, also known as Chicon 7, both as a panelist and eager attendee, and I can’t begin to describe my excitement: looking over the convention schedule is like browsing through the world’s best course catalog, with events like “Designing Spacecraft as a Hobby,” “LARPing: Make-Believe For Adults,” and “How to Write for Furries”—although the one I really can’t wait to attend is Sy Liebergot’s presentation on the lessons of Apollo 13.

I’m able to attend Worldcon this year because of the lucky confluence of a number of factors. This year’s convention is being held at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, only half an hour’s train ride from my house, so it’s practically in my back yard. It’s also been an unusually productive year for me on the science fiction front: over the last eighteen months, I’ve published four stories in Analog, including “The Boneless One,” probably my best work, which ended up in the latest edition of The Year’s Best Science Fiction. Realistically speaking, I don’t think I’ll have another run like this for a long time, if ever, so it’s very fortunate that my best year in the science fiction field happens to coincide with the convention taking place such a convenient location. Will I ever go again? I really hope so—although right now it seems best to regard it as a special treat in a year that qualifies as an outlier by any measure.

At the moment, I’m scheduled to appear on five panels over the course of four days, and I hope you’ll check them out if you’re there. Here’s my schedule:

• Thursday August 30, 4:30 pm. New Writers Session 1. A panel for new and debut writers to discuss their work and careers. Moderator: S. J. Chambers. Panelists: Alec Nevala-Lee, Emma Newman, Hanna Martine, Thomas Olde Heuvelt.
• Friday August 31, 3:00 pm. Turning Ideas Into Stories. Many people ask authors where they get their ideas. This panels asks: “How do you develop your ideas into stories?” Moderator: Louise Marley. Panelists: Alec Nevala-Lee, Jamie Todd Rubin, Roland Green, Tim Akers.
• Saturday September 1, 9:00 am. Men Writing Women. Many male writers have written stories from the female protagonist point of view or even using a female pseudonym. This panel will explore this issue from a variety of perspectives. Moderator: Bradley P. Beaulieu. Panelists: Alec Nevala-Lee, Jan Bogstad, Myke Cole, Russell Davis.
• Saturday September 1, 3:00 pm. Develop Your Story Idea. We will take an idea or two from the audience and work on how we would turn it into a story. Moderator: B. A. Chepaitis. Panelists: Alec Nevala-Lee, Courtney Schafer, Jamie Todd Rubin, Martha Wells.
• Sunday September 2, 3:00 pm. Stalking the Elusive Story Idea. What is creativity? Can it be taught? Is it possible to generate story ideas on demand? A discussion of the practical aspects of inspiration, brainstorming, and the search for material, from the perspective of the working writer. Moderator: Jay Lake. Panelists: Alec Nevala-Lee, Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Stephen Leigh, Vylar Kaftan.

If that last panel’s description has a familiar ring, that isn’t a coincidence: it’s a topic I suggested, and I’m really looking forward to it. As for the rest, they all look like fun, especially “Develop Your Story Idea,” which could either be fascinating or a magnificent train wreck. Hope to see some of you there!