Podcast

Transcript

John Goodwin(00:06): Hello, and welcome to the Writers of the Future Podcast. This is John Goodwin, your host. This podcast is dedicated to the aspiring writer and artist and will provide inspiration and tips from top professionals in the field. If you’ve been listening to this podcast or are new to it, I thank you very much. I would also appreciate if you took a moment to follow it on whatever platform you used to listen to your podcast. Writers of the Future is one of the longest-running writing competitions in the world.

Now celebrating over four decades of providing a helping hand as initially conceived by L. Ron Hubbard. Today’s guest is Ben Yalow. I met Ben at this year’s DragonCon in the Bain publishing suite. I had known of him for many years. Ben has been a major influence on science fiction and fantasy fandom going back to the 1970s. His business card simply states, Convention Planner. I’m very excited to discuss a topic very few are qualified for. Welcome Ben.

Ben Yalow(01:00): Thank you.

John Goodwin(01:03): All right, so I got all kinds of questions, but I’m gonna start with basics. Let’s first of all just define fandom. I’ve talked to many people over the years. Fred Pohl was one of our judges, and I had many discussions with him about fandom and all scientification versus science fiction versus sci-fi and all those things. They’re fun discussions, but let’s first just start with what is fandom?

Ben Yalow(01:27): What I think of as fandom is the culture that goes back to the combination of the letter column in Amazing Stories, which started in 1926, and which in their letters to the editor published the addresses of the people who were writing letters to the editor, which meant that people suddenly not only knew that there were other people interested, they knew how to contact them. No, they didn’t have email addresses, no, they didn’t have phone numbers, letters, letters, really. So the combination of that and the first convention and there is an argument as to what the first convention was. Either Philadelphia in 1936 or Leeds in 1937.

Basically where that discussion comes from is that Leeds announced they were holding a convention at which point a group of fans in New York and the group of fans in Philadelphia said, let’s get together and we’ll hold a meeting. And we’ll hold a business. Not only will we hold a day-long get together, but we’ll even have a business meeting where we will announce another convention. So Philadelphia sort of jumped the gun. Leeds announced first. Philadelphia, you can make an argument one way or the other, was it a real convention? Was it not? Well, it held a meeting, but you can also say it was just a bunch a New York fan club went to meet the Philadelphia fan club. Okay. So that’s why I say first convention in 36 or 37. And basically what I think of as fandom is the culture that has sprung from that combination of people writing to each other, which ended up producing fanzines, and clubs and conventions that grew out of that.

John Goodwin(04:08): Good. So then with that is the beginning of fandom. So your draw to fandom. So when did you get attracted and pulled into fandom?

Ben Yalow(04:20): In the magazines, and as with most of the people involved in reading SF in the 60s and 70s, there was so much, SF was in the magazines. You had to read the magazines in order to stay current in what’s going on in the field. And the magazines frequently had discussions about things going on at conventions, things like that. And I assume that conventions, I mean they sounded interesting, but they were clearly for not readers like me, but for fans. But then in 1971, Lunacon, which was the New York convention that had been going on since the 50s, announced that John W. Campbell was going to be the guest of honor at Lunicon that year. Now, John W. Campbell basically a combination of through his writing, but far more through his editing, wrote the vocabulary that still occupies SF to this day.

Almost all of the vocabulary that we use came from John Campbell, and I basically said, I gotta meet this guy. I realize this thing is very, it’s for other people, but this gives me a chance to meet this guy, who I hero worshiped. So I went there, brought a book for him to autograph.

He was, of course, completely gracious, autographed it. I still have it, of course. And he looked at my name tag and said, You wrote a letter to the editor a couple of months ago. Let me tell you why you’re wrong.

John Goodwin(06:39): Ha ha.

Ben Yalow(06:41): He proceeded to tell me why I was wrong for about ten minutes while I’m sort of occasionally saying something, but mostly I’m a nineteen-year-old kid at his first convention, and he’s John Campbell, so I’m not saying too much. And then he says, we’ve been talking about ten minutes. We need to continue this. Drags me down to the bar in the lobby, and I’m a nineteen-year-old kid at his first convention.

Sitting in the bar in the lobby with John Campbell. Okay. It will probably not surprise you to know that John Campbell doesn’t get to sit alone in a bar with a nineteen year old kid in the lobby bar at a convention, a major convention.

And very shortly afterwards I’m looking around and saying, and that’s Asimov, and that’s Clement, that’s Lester Del Rey. I need to come to more of these. So I promptly signed up for the next WorldCon, which was going to be the WorldCon in ‘71 in Boston, Nor East Con, and have been involved ever since.

John Goodwin(08:15): Wow, that’s quite an introduction to it.

Ben Yalow(08:17): I think of myself as in some ways the last person who John Campbell personally dragged into fandom since he died shortly thereafter. I certainly am there because of John Campbell.

John Goodwin(08:34): Yeah. So that’s obviously a very fond memory with conventions. I mean, that’s a serious, you know, introduction. That maybe makes you uniquely qualified to have done what the rest of your life continued doing. So any other fond memories you’ve got with concerning conventions?

Ben Yalow(08:55): Literally thousands of them. I’ve been incredibly honored in the field. I’ve worked on hundreds of conventions, basically starting as a gopher and working my way up. I’ve chaired the Lunicon that was the convention that I went to for the very first time. I’ve chaired some other regional conventions. I’ve chaired a WorldCon. I’ve been guest of honor at a WorldCon. I’ve been incredibly honored by fandom. I have a Big Heart trophy, which is an incredible honor. All of those are incredibly fond memories. And being able to help pay back the field that has brought so much wonderful opportunities and wonderful friends. I am always glad to help pay it back. Sure. I’ll never be able to pay it back as much from all the things that I’ve gained.

John Goodwin(10:10): Which is part of what they said too is like you can’t really pay back but you can pay forward.

Ben Yalow(10:15): I’m paying forward as best I can and I know that I’ve received so much that I’ll never be able to pay forward as much as I’ve gotten.

John Goodwin(10:26): Well that’s good, yes. So first fandom. If you can like, ’cause I know there’s fandom versus pop culture and I’ve, I sent questions, but I’m already jumbling them up based on as the conversation goes here. So I mean, fandom is like with the regional conventions and the WorldCon. I mean I was just at the last WorldCon it was under four thousand people there, around four thousand people attending and but then the week after I was in Atlanta at DragonCon, which was eighty thousand people, and then Tuesday I fly to Salt Lake City for FanX Salt Lake, which has 110,000 people. So there’s quite a disparity between the sizes of the conventions. So, and I’ve, I mean I’ve got my own opinions, which I’m going to keep to myself honest, but I’m talking to yourself like there’s a definite like pop culture versus I don’t know if you can call them the purists or just straight science fiction fantasy as just a genre by itself without any media tie-ins. Can you define like the difference between pop culture versus fandom as you perceive it?

Ben Yalow(11:40): I hate to draw lines.

John Goodwin(11:44): Fair enough, fair enough.

Ben Yalow(11:46): We have too many lines, which I think in some ways has been bad for the field, both in terms of culturally and quite frankly in terms of literature. When I grew up first reading SF, we knew something like Lord of the Rings was clearly fantasy. Clearly something like Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity was.

John Goodwin(12:00): Mm-hmm.

Ben Yalow(12:16): Clearly SF. And then there was a whole bunch in between. And it was all part of the field. Now I think, in part due to Amazon keywords, this is defined as this flavor of fantasy, this flavor of science fiction, this flavor. No, it’s all the genre and pop culture took things that people who were interested in fandom were also interested in and used that to continue to expand. But the very first WorldCon in New York in ‘39, there was a ball game as the final part of the world con.

John Goodwin(13:02): Mm-hmm.

Ben Yalow(13:15): Why? Because fans were interested in it. So I hate to say this is pop culture, this is fandom. It’s a continuum and the more closely you self-identify with our history, the closer I think of to being purely what I think of as fandom. But it all expands.

John Goodwin(13:44): I agree, I agree with you with what you’re saying there. But what I’ve observed or what I’ve perceived though with fandom, like a good friend of mine, Kevin J. Anderson, he’s the one that writes the Dune books. And earlier on at the start of his career, this is with Locus, which has since changed, you know, with Charles Brown, not wanting to review his books because he was doing tie-ins and he was writing in other universes and it wasn’t his own universe that he was creating.

And so he would never get reviews from Locus. And I mean I had discussions with Charles about it because he used to come every year to our Writers of the Future event. Talk to the winners and say, give up, quit, don’t do it anymore. That’s it. And I asked him, why do you do that? Because if somebody they don’t even know can talk them out of it, they have no business being a writer. But that, you know, that aside, Kevin found that he wasn’t welcome at, you know, what at that point is, I was wondering, well, is it the purest versus the ones that wanna just straight entertainment because when I go to a pop convention, you know, I said there’s eighty thousand people at the last one, but there’s a lot of kids, you know, families come there. And when I go to, I was just at the last WorldCon and for the most part it’s older folks, you know, there’s more, there’s adults and not so much the kids there. So I was wondering if that’s, if there’s something that would delineate and keep them separate. I used to always, you know, you had like some of people I used to work with earlier on. I know, you know, like Bob Silverberg, he’d go in the convention, he’d be walking up and down, taking over Heinlein’s role just walking up and down, saying hello to everybody, nodding at everybody, acknowledging everybody. And that that was just a different scene. You don’t see that at a pop convention.

I was just curious if you’ve got any particular scene on that. Cause I know we’ll get into first fandom what that is.

Ben Yalow(15:47): Partially we have what started out with media conventions, which we didn’t used to have. Media conventions go back to the, I’ll make the argument that says that media conventions go back to the first Star Trek con in ‘72, January of ‘72 in New York. And that caused a greater expansion. I mean, there had already been aspects, comics, which of course grew out of science fiction. Comic book fandom was mainly driven by science fiction fandom. And we expanded our culture and took in comic book, and then we started even having pure comic book conventions.

And then they were pure comic book conventions, except that they had a bit of straight SF and the same way that the TrekCon started out as a combination of media and straight SF. SF is tricky to read. SF needs you to be able to read differently from the way you would read contemporary fiction. Literary fiction is pretty straightforward to read. You know, you see what’s happening. Now, if it’s a mystery or some other genre, you know, you might not know, you know, the figure in the shadows fires a gun and kills somebody. Well, you don’t know who the figure in the shadows is.

You’ll find out by the end of the mystery or something like that. But science fiction is hard to read because you really don’t necessarily know what’s going on until you get further on into the book. And you have to be willing to keep reading even though you don’t know what’s going on. I mean classic kind of example. You get the opening sentence of a science fiction story, and it says suddenly her world exploded. Now, if the second sentence of that story says her fiance has run off with another woman, we now know what that first sentence means.

If the second sentence says, Fragments of shattered crust started bouncing off the shield of the spaceship, you have an entirely different meaning for what that first sentence is. You have to be able to read that first sentence and say, I don’t know what’s happening. I’m comfortable not knowing what’s happening. I will find out later.

And it might be that second sentence, because I gave examples of two different second sentences. It might be you aren’t gonna know for another paragraph, another chapter. You don’t know, and you’ve got to be prepared to, you’ve gotta be prepared to keep reading even though you don’t know what’s happening. That’s hard. That’s not what people are, that’s not the way people are trained to read.

You know, they’re trained to read: I look at what it says and that’s what it means. Well, it’s what it says and it means something and I’ll find out later. Which means that in some senses SF is a limiting factor. Because again, you’ve got to be prepared to read and defer until later what does this really mean?

John Goodwin(20:15): Right. Okay, so now you’ve got growing and decaying. You’ve got like the growth of pop culture and then maybe decay isn’t the right word, but it’s getting the shrinking of like we got LosCon here in in LA. It’s down to like seven hundred people there. It used to be thousands, you know, and it gets it’s shrinking as, you know, like I said, you have WonderCon in Anaheim, which has got a hundred some odd thousand, San Diego Comic Con, hundred and forty thousand. So it’s not that there’s no interest, it’s just it’s an evolution.

Ben Yalow(20:56): When we started, there was no place for people like us to go except to a straight SF convention. That’s where people like us could find other people like us. Then the culture changed. There was a culture war and we won. Which is great, but it also means that straight SF conventions aren’t the only place you can go to satisfy your need for meeting people like us. You can go to lots of other places. And that’s fine. That’s not a problem. The more people like us can find places to meet other people like us, the better off people like us are.

The fact that some pure SF conventions, particularly pure literary SF conventions, are slowly shrinking, it’s not a problem. I mean, the conventions have to be able to negotiate their way through understanding what it is that is likely to have people show up at their convention, and how many people will it be? And how do you amortize out the fixed costs? Because if you don’t have a lot of fixed costs, you don’t care whether a convention is 50 people or 5,000 people or 50,000 people.

If it’s all variable costs, you can run the same, you can run a convention at any size, but you’ve gotta be able to estimate what your fixed cost component is and how many people do you need to amortize that out of.

John Goodwin(22:52): Right.

John Goodwin(23:05): I get it. So now with you know, so we we’ve got this thing you’ve got the pure SF.

Ben Yalow(23:12): Remember I don’t believe that there is a line between SF and fantasy.

John Goodwin(23:18): Right, I hear you on that, but I just what I observe though is this the gradual shrinking of the classic or what you can call it science fiction conventions and the growth of pop culture conventions, which has a lot of science fiction and fantasy authors and it’s all the mixes too, all the blends, which is keeping up, you know.

I originally got started, what hooked me on science fiction was the E.E. Doc Smith on the Lensman series and the Skylark Duquesne series. I just loved it. I read that multiple times. That was just like what you were saying there, you didn’t know what’s going to happen, but I was just taking me for the ride. I wanted that ride, that journey was so delicious. Even knowing what was gonna happen, I wanted to go through it again. You know, so that to me is great. And on this podcast, I’ve interviewed, I’ve had Bob Silverberg as a guest, and I wish that I had his podcast going with Hal Clement, just such a lovely man. He was a Writers of the Future judge. Fred Pohl, he was a hoot and a half. He definitely had his opinions and I loved chatting with him about it. And but it was, you know, that’s the purist side. And then you get the other guys that like are going for what well, what do people want? What’s hitting bestseller lists? And looking at as a as a viable career for them as an author. And they started looking at well, where are my readers? And it seemed to be that there was a conflict of opinion. But maybe just like you said there, there’s, you know, you didn’t have any fixed costs if you needed to do it because you just wanted to meet with those other like minded people. We’ll go in my basement of my home, which has no fixed costs, except for the vacuum cleaner electricity to vacuum up after the show after it’s over with.

Ben Yalow(25:04): And you had, well, unfortunately, we no longer have because it got killed post-COVID, but we had a convention MidwestCon, which you know ran from 1950 until COVID, and it had no program, it had no anything that you think of.

John Goodwin(25:14): Yeah, I used to attend that.

Ben Yalow(25:34): As mandatory for a convention. It had a tiny dealer’s room, which was usually a couple of people selling their spare books. it might or might not have an art show. It had an art show for a few years and then gave up on it. And basically it consisted of getting a bunch of fans sitting around, chatting with each other. No program, no nothing. And that was a wonderful convention. I attended it every year from basically the mid-70s until it finally wasn’t able to restart post-COVID. But it was a convention. It didn’t have all the things that you might think of as necessary for a convention. But what it had was a bunch of fans interested in talking to other fans.

And that was good enough. That was absolutely good enough. It was a wonderful convention.

John Goodwin(26:37): Right. Now, okay, so this just moving on here a little bit, you mentioned that you were given the Big Heart Award and I’ve got my book, I’ve got a booklet here called First Fandom Membership Directory in 2017 and it has a brief history of the Big Heart Award by David Kyle. What it says just to get which just to let people listening to this know what an honor it is that you did receive that. Science fiction enthusiasts gather annually at the World Science Fiction Convention as part of a worldwide nameless society called Fandom.

We have close and long range friendships, have clubs, websites, and attend get togethers. And among us there are some special fans known for their selfless deeds, each one of who has a spirit of big heartedness, especially single out once a year to receive the big heart award. So I mean that’s quite an honor. So it goes on to define like the description science fiction dates back to its creation by pioneering Hugo Gernsback in the 1920s.

Out of that historic past came fandom. Nearly half a century ago, two prominent fans, Forrest J. Ackerman and Walter J. Doherty. And Ackerman was also one of the [literary] agents for L. Ron Hubbard as an author. But Forrest J. Ackerman marked the passing of one who had become the personification of our fellowship, special fan and pro, E. Everett Evans. In Evans’ honor and in the name Ackerman and Doherty created the Big Heart Award. So did you know Evans?

Ben Yalow(28:01): No. Ackerman I obviously knew.

John Goodwin(28:04): Yeah, he was all over the place with science fiction. But anyway, so I mean that’s an awesome award that you were, you know, that recognition from is it basically is it from fandom or is it from First Fandom specifically that they get together and decide?

Ben Yalow(28:19): It’s from First Fandom basically generally what happens is they consult the people who are administering the award, consult with past recipients and say, you know, who do you think has contributed in major ways and not received the recognition? But that’s okay. They’re doing it from behind the scenes.

John Goodwin(28:53): Right. Yeah, and you got, you received yours in 2015. And then I see also the first one was Doc, E. E. Doc Smith, I just talking about looking at it here in 1959, and then B. Joe Trimble, who I know, she’s the one that salvaged Star Trek and then David Kyle in 1973. He was he was Shasta Publishing, you knew David?

Ben Yalow(29:20): Yeah, and he was also Red Jacket Press.

John Goodwin(29:26): Yeah, he was. Everywhere he had his red jacket where he went. With his first, with his first fandom emblem on the left chest pocket there. And then there was also, let’s see who else I’m looking through the list. Andre Norton in 1988. She was one of our judges. She was the one that got me interested in reading Fantasy, The Witch World series. I just love that series. And at the point when I was, she was also like I said, a judge for the Writers of the Future contest and she got to the point where she couldn’t travel anymore because of her arthritis. So with her, I was just over the phone talking with her. She loved the contest and loved helping the new writers, but I loved her fantasy. To me it was addictive. And then Julie Schwartz, he used to come to our Writers of Future events.

And Jack Williamson. I remember when he was in 1994. It was in the, I guess, late nineties, because he was a judge for Writers of the Future from the beginning. And he was probably at this point late in his eighties. And we had a Writers of Future event in Cape Canaveral, Cape Kennedy. And we had everybody there to see one of the shuttle launches. And he’d been writing about space and flying space and spaceships since the 1920s, but he’d never seen a spaceship launch. And we were there, we were the closest civilians to one of the shuttles, space shuttles.

He was like a little kid. He was just like so animated. He finally saw a spaceship lift off. And you used to television where you can s a space launch lasts for five minutes, ten minutes, with keeping all the different angles like that. Twenty seconds, thirty seconds, you see a little dot in the sky and it’s gone. You know, it’s amazing. But it’s just you know.

Ben Yalow(31:15): I mean, long, those telephoto lenses make it possible to follow the ship far, far further than you can see with the naked eye or even reasonable size binoculars.

John Goodwin(31:30): Exactly. And now with Elon Musk and his they got the cameras on the ships themselves so you can still see it and as the you know, it’s just amazing what you can see now compared to what that first thing I saw back in 1969 when I saw the first time I saw something, a color launch, we got a color TV so we could watch it, you know, the launch that went to the moon. But then also, then after Jack Williamson, there’s like I said, Bob Silverberg.

And Jack Williamson again. And then there’s John Hurtz. He he’s the one that invented the beanie cap with the with the rotor on it. That was John Hurtz?

Ben Yalow(32:10): No, he isn’t the one who invented it, but he

John Goodwin(32:13): He’s the one that popularized it, or at least took advantage of it.

Ben Yalow(32:16): One of the few people who still keeps that tradition.

John Goodwin(32:20): I haven’t seen him for a long time, but yeah. And then Forey Ackerman there in 2006. Then you again in I said two 2015. So on First Fandom, so it’s different, you know,

Ben Yalow(32:39): I mean, in a sense, what we have now as an organization called First Fandom is different from what First Fandom was when I first grew up in fandom because the idea originally had been that First Fandom was the people who had been involved since the beginning. Well, eventually they all died.

John Goodwin(33:07): Yeah.

Ben Yalow(33:09): So First Fandom started out with an associate membership when there were still real First Fans around.

John Goodwin(33:21): And that’s when it was “scientifiction” back then.

Ben Yalow(33:24): Gernsbach really had no idea about what sort of langu…, “scientifiction” is just an ugly term. Remember, it doesn’t sound interesting. SF or sci-fi, which got the name primarily because of HiFi in the fifties, and so sci-fi became popular, but scientifiction was really a terrible term.

John Goodwin(33:38): Yeah, I agree.

John Goodwin(34:00): But this is what’s on the label though. It’s on the patch though, the First Fandom patch, at least it’s on the, what’s on the cover of the magazine.

Ben Yalow(34:07): Gernsbach invented the term and that was the term. But it was still, it was not an attractive term, but it was what the field used at the time.

John Goodwin(34:19): Right. Agreed.

John Goodwin(34:25): Yeah, what it says is the illustration for the concept of scientific fiction is from a design by Frank R. Paul. It was adapted by David A. Kyle for a First Fandom membership patch.

Ben Yalow(34:35): Yeah. And of course Frank R. Paul was the first WorldCon guest of honor. It was very strange. The first guest of honor was not a writer but was an illustrator. You know, since then you had writers and editors, and then eventually you started getting artists back in as guests of honor when it had expanded.

John Goodwin(35:03): Yeah.

Ben Yalow(35:04) But when there was only one guest of honor, it was gonna be generally, it was gonna be a writer or like John Campbell. Frank R. Paul was, you know, the he was the original illustrator that sort of defined what SF covers looked like.

John Goodwin(35:31): Yeah, I never knew him.

Ben Yalow(35:33): Since then the field has changed. And we’ve had artists who defined what I think of as the pulp era covers. There, I would probably pick Hubert Rogers and Ed Cartier on the fantasy side. And then for a while, Kelly Frias was, in a sense, the defining illustrator for SF for many, many years.

John Goodwin(36:12): Yeah, both Ed and Kelly were some of the original judges for the Illustrators of the Future contest. And Kelly was the original coordinating judge until his passing. And Ed Cartier was just I mean, he was just, he wrote a really nice, when we published a book on Writers of the Future, he wrote a really nice essay on writing on illustrating L. Ron Hubbard and just an a story he had where when he was doing the illustrations, the authors pretty much looked down on the illustrators as the artists, you know. So it’s the writer back in in those days that was the main attraction. And he said that Hubbard was one  of the few or the only one that ever just sat down with him and just talked with him and really appreciated his art that he did. Because he said he loved illustrating Hubbard’s works, Ole Doc Methuselah being one of them that he did.

But it’s yeah, that was an amazing era of art and how does, cause that was true illustration that these guys did that those pictures told a story in and of themselves.

Ben Yalow(37:25): Absolutely. I got a chance to meet Ed Cartier at one of the Writers of the Future things in New York.

John Goodwin(37:33): When were you at a Writers the Future event?

Ben Yalow(37:35): There was an event at the UN in New York very, very early. Budrys, who was in charge of everything at that stage, knew that I absolutely adored Ed Cartier’s work and arranged for me to be able to get to that event at the UN and meet Cartier.

John Goodwin(38:03): How cool is that? I didn’t go to that event because I was at that point I was on a production team. I was making sure that the book was printed and in the stores and all the different places it needed to be. So I for the first several years I didn’t attend the events. I was making sure that, you know, we had books for the events on that side of the…

Ben Yalow(38:24): Generally I didn’t attend. I wasn’t, I’m not a fiction writer. I’m not an artist. But AJ knew…

John Goodwin(38:36): He was an amazing man, an amazing man. He so cared for the genre.

Ben Yalow(38:42): He was also not only a brilliant writer, but arguably one of the finest critics that the field has ever seen.

John Goodwin(38:50): Yeah. He was funny. He had this one story when he, the first time he met Hubbard, it was in Chicago at a convention there, and they were all in the big auditorium and then he said all of a sudden, a hush came over and he’s heard hearing his whispered, Hubbard’s here, Hubbard’s here. And so he said it was like for himself his, the hair on his arms and the back of his neck just like electrified when he when he walked up there.

And he was just, you know, he was he totally fanboyed out on that one there. And he was, some of the original communications between him and L. Ron Hubbard when I first started the contest, you know, he was you know, he really valued what the contest meant for the future of science fiction that he was doing at that, you know, what he was doing at that point then. And I, he had where my offices are here in Hollywood, he had an office on the second floor where he worked on assembly and putting the book together until his passing, then when Dave Wolverton, who was the winner in volume three, took over. But he was such an amazing, caring person. He was a good critic. He definitely had his opinion and he’d hold to it, but he was always trying to do it from the perspective of assistance. He gave a critique to a book or to a story written by Robert Sawyer, the Canadian author. And it was a reject, but he gave him tips on what to do to turn it into a novel, which he did, sold it and disqualified himself from the contest. But that was what, you know, the contest was meant to do, and that’s what Algis was very, very keen to make happen.

Ben Yalow(40:30): Well, the thing about Hubbard is that for the most part, unless you studied the history of the field, you don’t think of him as a writer because you think Scientology, Dianetics, etc.

On the other hand, something like Final Blackout absolutely holds up when it comes to horror. I can use fear as one of the great horror stories. So absolutely he was a significant writer and he was very much a part of Campbell’s stable.

John Goodwin(41:27): For sure. When he was brought on board, the publisher Street and Smith told Campbell, publish whatever Hubbard sends you. Because at that point, science fiction had been the spaceships, ray guns, robots, and Hubbard was an adventure writer. So they said, we need to bring people, more humanizing of science fiction. So that’s why he was that Campbell was given the direction just publish whatever he submits to you.

And it was it’s interesting because I’ve talked to a lot of our judges, you know, and Heinlein when he talked about Final Blackout, he called that as perfect a piece of science fiction as ever been written. And Fred Pohl really enjoyed the he thought it was just really fun on some of his works that he that he wrote, how his works became part of the language. He said very few people actually did that.

And so he was, because all these when they became judges, you know, there was they did it because they wanted to support the contest and had some greater or lesser degree of affinity for L. Ron Hubbard and his works and what he did. And so Fred Pole had his things. I’m sure that you knew Jerry Pournell. He was on To the Stars. He was, he said it’s the greatest book that’s been written in the history of the universe. He like, he loved that book there. And then Mike Resnick was talked about Typewriter in the Sky was the first recursive science fiction book.

Ben Yalow(43:02): Typewriter in the Sky was enormously silly and enormous fun. And the original publication in book form was a compendium of Fear and Typewriter in the Sky.

John Goodwin(43:08): Exactly.

Ben Yalow(43:20): Yep, I have that book on my shelf.

John Goodwin(43:22): Yeah. And what he liked about it was just that, you know, it I mean, the author in that book there is Horace Hackett, you know, and just how he didn’t do his research and he already received his advance and spent it before he even started writing it. And the publisher came in to say, so where do you stand this thing here? And he’s just like making it up off the cuff as he’s talking to him, and then he writes his friend into the story.

And then a movie came out 15 or so years ago called Stranger Than Fiction, which movie review said that’s L. Ron Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky. That thing there. What’s interesting with Hubbard and with also with Heinlein and other authors of the golden age, you’ll find, I guess, fans and they’ll talk about a more recent book, and they’ll say, yeah, that’s already been done. You know, Hubbard just copied it, and then we say, or Heinlein or something, then you say, Okay, well they wrote that book in 1946 or like and then all of a sudden they go, you know, they don’t realize that some of the stuff is like recycling again as the story ideas.

Ben Yalow(44:32) The classic comment of why read Shakespeare? It’s just full of all these cliches.

John Goodwin(44:40): Exactly. You know, and in Star Wars, Spielberg says he pulled heavily from pulp fiction. And in fact, there’s one scene, where Luke gets Han Solo where he hires him in the bar, that bar scene. It’s almost like word for word from the one the pulp fiction book called The Kingslayer. And Seven Steps to the Arbiter is another name for that same story.

You know, so you find different things and I know that there’s other TV series that were, you know, just pulled from all the old pulp’s stories of the thirties and forties. But that’s in the last interview that Hubbard did, he said, What was it like? You know, he was asked what’s it like you know, in golden age. He said, Well then it wasn’t. Golden age came that was a term that came later. He then, he said at that point it was just so much raw creativity from so many people, just we were just like on a roll, just writing stuff. And it was between World War I and World War II and it was after the Depression and half of America was out of work and people needed that escape fiction. And that’s what it was. And if you weren’t pulled into the story by the second paragraph, they were like, Okay, good, next, you know, you…

Ben Yalow(46:05): And the thing was that John Campbell hovered over all of it because Astounding was the place to publish. And for the thirty-nine issues that it managed to last, Unknown was the place to publish fantasy. I mean, unfortunately, Unknown was sacrificed during the war.

John Goodwin(46:31): Paper shortages.

Ben Yalow(46:33): Yeah, basically the feds went to Campbell and said, either you take Astounding bi-monthly or you fold Unknown. We’re not going to give you enough paper to do both. And Campbell rightly judged that Astounding‘s readers would have no problem with the kind of fantasy that he was publishing in Unknown. And he was right.

You know, you could see that kind of stuff in Astounding and it worked perfectly well. Astounding readers were glad to read it. But Unknown I very much treasure my run of Unknown on my bookshelves.

John Goodwin(47:20): I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do. Do you, are you familiar with that story of when the FBI came to see Campbell about printing the top secret information?

Ben Yalow(47:33): Yeah, deadline, the Cleve Cardinal story.

John Goodwin(47:36): Yeah. Can you tell the, share that one ’cause I’m sure people will love to hear this.

Ben Yalow(47:41): Well basically Deadline was a story that appeared in Astounding, talking about an atomic bomb and even had a reasonably good description of an atomic bomb, what it looks like, how it would work, things like that. The problem was this was in 1944.

John Goodwin(48:07): Before.

Ben Yalow(48:09): Boy, was the atomic bomb as top secret as you could get. And the FBI naturally had to go see was this a leak? Was this, what, why are they publishing descriptions of atomic bombs in 1944?

So the FBI shows up at Campbell’s office and they can’t say, you published this story about an atomic bomb. This is the most highly classified tippy top secret thing that we have. Where did you find out about this tippy top secret thing that we can’t even admit exists or ask you questions about it because it’s so tippy top secret that we can’t even admit it exists?

So they were dancing around in Campbell’s office. Obviously Campbell knew what they were talking about, but he wasn’t gonna say anything. And so they keep sort of were dancing around and eventually he was able to convince the FBI that no, he wasn’t even gonna stop publishing stories about atomic energy and atomic bombs and things like that.

Because if he did, his readers would see why did he stop publishing? I guess that means there is one. So no, he couldn’t even stop publishing stuff about it. The thing is that what he could not admit to the FBI was that, well, he knew they were building an atomic bomb. He knew who was building an atomic bomb.

He knew where they were building an atomic bomb.

John Goodwin(50:04): Explain how he knew that.

Ben Yalow(50:06): Well, he knew his readership. And when suddenly all of these physicists and engineers and people like that are all changing their subscription addresses to this mailbox in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. Okay, I know what these people can be building.

John Goodwin(50:32): Ha

Ben Yalow(50:37): I know that they’re building it somewhere near this P.O. box in the middle of nowhere. Boy could he not say that to the FBI because if so, he would have been locked up until the end of the war.

John Goodwin(50:51): Yes, yes. That’s a great story. It’s a funny story too, how he knew all these things here just from deduction, just by all the post office boxes address changes for these scientists and engineers.

So, we’re getting close to the to the end. So, anything that you would like to say about the future of fandom? We’ve got like two minutes or so.

Ben Yalow(51:16): I think fandom will continue to exist. It will continue to vary. The literature is what drives people into fandom, and what keeps them in fandom is the friends they make. It’s I mean, there are fans who stop reading SF and still stay in touch with their friends in fandom because.

It’s where your friends are. You’ve met all these people, you’ve corresponded with them, you’ve been in fanzines with them, and that’s what’s absolutely wonderful. And SF gets you there. Fandom keeps you there. The people boundaries are bad. Boundaries, sharp lines, distinctions.

Never, never really good. The thing is, there’s a whole bunch of people who are interested in SF, or at least were at some point and are still interested in it. And I am thrilled that it keeps going. I’m glad to have

helped it keep going or the hundreds of conventions that I’ve worked on. Because basically it’s a labor of love. It’s not a labor of money because there is no money in this business. You don’t run conventions to make money. You run conventions because you’ve got to. It’s your way of paying forward.

John Goodwin(52:58): Right.

John Goodwin(53:08): Well it’s very, very much appreciated. And if somebody wants to be able to reach out to you, how do they, where do they go to find you?

Ben Yalow(53:16): I have an absolutely obsolete web page that I haven’t updated in for a decade. I don’t hang around on social media because I don’t have time. Best thing to do is show up at a convention and it’s more than likely that either I’ll be there or somebody who knows how to get a hold of me will be there.

John Goodwin(53:42): Sounds good. Sounds good. Well, thank you very much. I very much appreciate this time with you, Ben.

And thank you for listening. Subscribe to the Writers of the Future Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve also been syndicated on the United Public Radio Network where can find these podcasts as well.

Writers and Illustrators of the Future are contests created by L. Ron Hubbard to provide a means for the aspiring writer and artist to be seen and acknowledged for over four decades. It is free to enter and open to amateur short story writers and artists of science fiction or fantasy.

Again, thank you very much, Ben.

Ben Yalow(54:17): Glad to. Thank you.