In The Beginning by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Subterranean Press

The Hunters of Cutwold

(1957)

Harlan Ellison, who had been living next door to me in the summer of 1955 as my writing career suddenly and spectacularly took off, had a somewhat slower start himself, but by the middle of 1956 he, too, was selling stories about as fast as he could write them. Just as I had been, he was an avid science-fiction reader who longed to have his own stories published in the magazines he had read in his teens, and very quickly he joined Howard Browne’s team of staffers at Amazing and placed material with three or four other titles.

But he had a knack for writing crime stories too—tales of juvenile-delinquent kid-gangs were a specialty of his—and in the summer of 1956 he struck up a relationship with two new magazines that published that sort of thing, Trapped and Guilty. They paid an extravagant two cents a word, twice as much as what most of the science-fiction magazines we were selling to then would pay, and their editor, one W. W. Scott, seemed willing to buy as many stories as Harlan could bring them. Harlan was good enough to let me in on this bonanza, and, busy as I was meeting my monthly quota at Amazing and Imagination, I started doing crime stories too. My records show the sale of “Get Out and Stay Out” to Guilty in June, 1956, and “Clinging Vine” to Trapped a couple of weeks later.

And then W. W. Scott announced that he had been asked to edit a science-fiction magazine too, Super-Science Fiction, and Harlan and I suddenly had the inside track on a lucrative new market.

Scott—“Scottie,” everybody called him, except a few who called him “Bill”—was a short, cheerfully cantankerous old guy who would have fit right into a 1930s Hollywood movie about newspapermen, which was what I think he had been before he drifted into magazine editing. His office was tiny and crammed with weary-looking manuscripts that such agents as Scott Meredith, delighted to find a possible new market for ancient stuff that had been rejected everywhere, sent over by the ton. His voice was a high-pitched cackle; he had a full set of top and bottom dentures, which he didn’t always bother to wear; and I never saw him without his green eyeshade, which evidently he regarded as an essential part of the editorial costume. To us—and we both were barely past 21—he looked to be seventy or eighty years old, but probably he was 55 or thereabouts. He freely admitted to us that he knew next to nothing about science fiction and cared even less, and invited us to bring him as much material as we could manage.

We certainly did. Getting an open invitation like that from a two-cents-a-word market was like being handed the key to Fort Knox. In late June I wrote “Collecting Team” for him, which he published as “Catch ’em All Alive” in the first issue—December, 1956 of Super-Science. (Under its original title it has been reprinted dozens of times in school readers.

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