Creators of Science Fiction by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell Jr., Edward E. "Doc" Smith, Robert A. Heinlein, James Blish, Gregory Benford, Ian Watson
ISBN: 9781434438614
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

James Blish

James Blish was part of the second generation of genre sf writers: the generation that came to prominence in the years following the end of World War II. Had it not been for the war it would not be so easy to speak in terms of distinct generations, but many would-be writers who might have spent the early forties making steady progress were interrupted by the draft; Blish was one of several who picked up the threads after a lapse of several years, the process of his maturation having been bottled up but by no means stalled in the meantime.

Like many of his fellows in the New York-based fan group who styled themselves the “Futurians”, Blish placed a few amateurish stories in magazines edited by other members of the group (Donald A. Wollheim, Robert A. W. Lowndes, and Frederik Pohl) during 1940-42, but then served as a medical laboratory technician in the Army. Although he was discharged from the Army after refusing to obey an order, and then became a conscientious objector, he took advantage of the GI Bill to return to graduate school. He studied zoology for a year and then switched to literature, completing a thesis on Ezra Pound that he never submitted for his MA.

It was during the latter phase of his postgraduate work that Blish resumed writing in earnest, producing poetry and criticism as well as stories that ranged over a wide spectrum of the pulp market—although the great bulk of them were bought by a single editor, Bob Lowndes. Blish and Lowndes shared an apartment for some time in 1945-46, during which time they wrote the sf novel The Duplicated Man in collaboration, although Lowndes did not get around to publishing it until 1953. The head start that Blish gained as an sf writer by virtue of his friendship with Lowndes was counterbalanced by a rift in the Futurian clan, which set Blish and Don Wollheim fatally at odds—a hostility that endured for such a long time and cut so deep that Wollheim not only refused to publish Blish for nearly thirty years, but remained reluctant to have any dealings with the literary agency run by Blish’s first wife, Virginia Kidd.

When he married Kidd in 1947, Blish was working part-time—alongside Damon Knight and other Futurians—for the Scott Meredith Agency, “evaluating” stories sent in by neophyte writers who paid a fee for such criticism. The advice they gave out specified strict adherence to the Scott Meredith “plot skeleton”—which Blish allegedly extended from four elements to five by the addition of a penultimate crisis (although commonly-quoted versions of the formula usually stick to the original four: a sympathetic protagonist; an urgent problem; complications caused by initial failure to solve the problem; and a solution by means of the protagonist’s heroic efforts.)

His experience with the Meredith Agency helped Blish to cultivate a keen awareness of the mechanics of fiction, which became the part and parcel of the critical dissections he was to carry out in reviews and essays published between 1952 and 1962, mostly under the pseudonym William Atheling Jr.

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