Hell's Cartographers by Aldiss Brian; Harrison Harry; Bester Alfred

Author:Aldiss, Brian; Harrison, Harry; Bester, Alfred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2018-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

In 1955 the partners in a new fan publishing house called Advent approached me with the idea of making a collection of my book reviews. They gave me a contract under which I was to get half the profits after the costs of production had been met. I put the collection together from tearsheets and carbons, although my agent would have no part of it, and said I would never see a nickel. Anthony Boucher contributed an introduction, and I insisted that he get a percentage too. The collection was published in 1956. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1967, and the book has brought in a few hundred dollars every year since it was first published, for a total of about $2,000.

In 1958 James L. Quinn, the publisher of If, asked me to become the editor of the magazine. Larry Shaw had been the editor in the early fifties, when he published the original novelette version of Blish’s ‘A Case of Conscience’; but when Larry returned a story of Judith Merril’s because he thought she could sell it elsewhere for more money, Quinn took this as disloyalty and fired him. At this time Quinn had been editing the magazine himself for several years, and its circulation had been going down. He was faced with the choice of folding it or trying another editor. He did the layouts for If himself and was good at it, but his tastes in fiction ran to conventional satires about automobiles and computers. I edited three issues of If, and gave it my best, but the circulation did not go up and Quinn sold the magazine to Galaxy.

Among the stories I inherited when I began editing the magazine was one called ‘The Founding of Fishdollar Five’ (I shortened this to ‘The Fishdollar Affair’) by Richard McKenna. Quinn had promised McKenna he would buy this story if he would cut it in half. McKenna has told how he did this and how important it was to him in his ‘Journey With a Little Man’. The story was cut to the bone, and Quinn said he had not expected to be taken literally, but he bought it. I was impressed with McKenna and invited him to the Milford Conference. I also invited a writer named Kate Wilhelm, from whom I hadn’t bought anything but whose stories had caught my eye. These were fateful decisions.

I had visualized Kate Wilhelm as a middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair and flat heels; instead, she turned out to be young, slender and pretty. That year we had also invited an MIT student called Shag, who was not a professional writer and really should not have been there; he was hopelessly smitten with Katie. We sat up all night in the Blishes’ living room, the last night of the Conference, and in the morning A. J. Budrys and I took Kate to the train, where AJ kissed her and she shook hands with me. When we got back to the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.