Analog SFF, January-February 2010 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Dell Magazines

Special Feature: ACROSS MY LIFE... by Ben Bova

It started eighty years ago as Astounding Stories of Super Science, back in 1930. When I first came across the magazine, in the late 1940s, it was titled Astounding Science Fiction.

And it really was astounding. Under the editorial genius of John W. Campbell Jr., Astounding was the bellwether in what is generally regarded as science fiction's Golden Age. Month after month I read the works of Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Hal Clement, Theodore Sturgeon, Clifford Simak, Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Silverberg, Randall Garrett, and so many others ... it's breathtaking just to think about it, even now, after more than half a century.

I dearly wanted to write for Campbell. Little did I realize that one day I would succeed him as editor of “his” magazine.

The first stories I submitted to Analog were rejected, but with friendly letters that encouraged me to try again. Actually, I eventually sold those stories to Amazing.

Then I read a novelette in Analog (the magazine's name had changed in 1960) that I felt was technically inaccurate. I wrote to Campbell about it. He sent back a three-page, single-spaced letter that began, “Okay, wise guy!"

Once I got over the shock of that opening line, I realized that Campbell was challenging me to write a story that was better than the one I had panned. Most of his three pages were story ideas. I didn't use any of them, but wrote a short story that carried the idea of computer war-gaming to its ultimate conclusion. Campbell bought that one, “The Next Logical Step.” It was published in Analog's May 1962 issue.

Although I was writing only part-time, I started getting published fairly regularly in Analog and the other science fiction magazines; books, too, both fiction and nonfiction. I started to meet other writers, either at science fiction conventions or at the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference.

I met Harlan Ellison at one of the Milford Conferences, and we became fast friends even though he lived in California and I in Massachusetts. Harlan was enormously successful, but he had a secret yearning to be published in Analog. He was certain that it would never happen because he was Jewish and Campbell was anti-semitic.

I reminded Harlan that Campbell published Isaac Asimov and many other Jewish writers. “Campbell doesn't buy your work because you don't write science-based Analog-type stories."

Whereupon we hatched a plot. Harlan and I would co-author a story and offer it to Campbell under a nom de plume. When Campbell bought it, we would reveal ourselves as the authors.

The writing of that story, “Brillo,” is a saga that would take too many pages to explain for the purposes of this essay. Suffice to say that once we finished it (and most of the writing was done by Harlan) he liked the result so much he crowed, “Screw Campbell! We'll sell it to Playboy!"

We both had the same literary agent, and we instructed him to send “Brillo” to Playboy.

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