Along about 1937 (remember that landmark date!) a group of us formed a club of our own called the Futurian Society of New York. The founders and general big men were Don Wollheim, Robert W. Lowndes (editor of various science-fiction and fantasy magazines over the years) and myself; the troops included people like my late collaborator C. M. Kornbluth, Richard Wilson, and Isaac Asimov; and a little later on, Damon Rnight, Judith Merril, Hannes Bok, and others joined up. We were all pretty young. Don Wollheim was probably our senior citizen, for he had been old enough to vote in 1936, and he was senior in an even more important respect: he had actually sold a story or two to Wonder Stories.
That proved it could be done, and so the rest of us started out to win our share of the gold and glory.
We worked hard. Probably we worked hard because it didn't really seem like work to write science-fiction stories. (In all truth, it hardly seems like work now. In my downest moments I find to say for our world at least that it has managed to pay me a lifelong living for doing things I would have been perfectly happy to do for nothing.) Not all of our work was aimed at the paying markets, for all of us had our own little fan magazines—mimeographed or hectographed, published in editions of a dozen or a hundred copies—for which we wrote invariably rotten amateur stories and sometimes quite good scathing attacks on everybody else. But our sights were aimed higher, and by and by most of us began to sell to the newsstand magazines. Not easily. Not often. But all the same, somehow, we began to break in. Asimov got the new editor of Amazing to buy a story called "Marooned Off Vesta," which for some reason he does not usually include in his book collections these days. Wollheim and John B. Michel together managed to get a story into Astounding. Bob Lowndes sold a poem to Unknown. In permutations and combinations beyond counting we collaborated: Wollheim with Michel, Kornbluth with myself, Lowndes with somebody, Dirk Wylie with Dick Wilson . . . sometimes three of us would join forces on a single story, sometimes even more. The all-time record may have been six Futurians collaborating on a single 2,500-word story, which sold somewhere for a fraction of a cent a word, bringing each of them a dollar and change for their efforts. After a while, in 1939, I somehow got it into my head that I could edit a science-fiction magazine.
I had no particular reason for believing this, but it didn't look particularly hard. So I went to see an editor named Robert O. Erisman, whom I had come to know in the course of having a dozen or two stories rejected by him, and explained to him that as it seemed too difficult to make a living out of writing stories I would be delighted to become his assistant, please. He was marvelously kind. He didn't throw me out of his office. He didn't give me a job, either, but he suggested that I go to see another editor who was in charge of a large chain of pulps that did not include an sf magazine and see if I could talk him into giving me a shot at it. And so I went to see Rogers Terrill at Popular Publications, and Rog surprised all of us by giving me a desk and a budget and a printing schedule and orders to create a couple of sf magazines.
The budget was tiny, to be sure. My salary was even tinier. But there I was, buying stories and hiring artists and having a hell of a time. It was so much fun that the rest of the Futurian Society wanted to play that game too, and so Bob Lowndes persuaded a publisher named Louis Silberkleit to put him in charge of a magazine called Future, and Don Wolheim convinced a father-and-son team named Albert that what they needed was an sf magazine called Cosmic Stories with him as editor (they went along, but only up to a point: the sticking point was that they refused to pay for the stories, so Don had the problem of getting his writers to donate their stories). And all of a sudden, we Futurians were no longer on the outside looking in, we were the inside. We were being allowed to act out our fantasies in the real world. The inmates had taken charge of the institution.
Camelot never lasts; a war came along and blew us all away. Some of us went into the service. Others stayed out, but the magazines died in the wartime paper shortages. And that interlude passed into history.
But a few years later, a little older and hopefully a shade wiser, we were all back for more.
The war ended in 1945. Three or four years later the publishing industry had got back to its normal state of rosy optimism shaded by bankruptcies, and science fiction began to move again. Honorable hardcover houses (Random House was the biggest) brought out sf collections from the magazines; four or five fans around the country took their savings out of the bank and set up as semi-pro book publishers specializing in sf and fantasy, and there was talk of new magazines.
In the years just around 1950 occurred another of those editorial revolutions like John Campbell's; the difference was that this new golden age appeared on two fronts at once.
We mentioned earlier that business-office decisions have had major effects on the history of science fiction. Two of the quirkier ones occurred here. The publishers of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine decided that for corporate strength it ought to add a couple of titles. And an Italian publisher of gamy comics was making so much money that he decided to break into the American publishing world.
What the Ellery Queen people did was talk to their contributor Anthony Boucher, then mostly known as a mystery writer with a few sf stories and fantasies to his credit. Tony proposed what they called The Magazine of Fantasy (the title later broadened to include and Science Fiction, or F&SF for short). They thought it worth trying out. Tentatively. They brought it out as a one-shot, and were pleased enough with the sales to try it again as a quarterly, as a bi-monthly, and ultimately as a monthly.
What the Italian publisher did was to open a New York office and then go looking for magazines to publish. I will not list the magazines because it is too painful; but somehow someone put "science fiction" on the list, and their editor, Vera Cerutti, was appointed to make it happen. Vera didn't know that much about sf, but she knew that she didn't, and more than that she knew somehow who did. His name was Horace Gold.
The Golden Age of Gold sounds like either a misfired attempted joke or a Shostakovich ballet, but it was very real. Around 1950, Horace Gold was a prematurely bald man in his mid-30s, somewhat the worse for a World War II disability but well able to cope with the world. Where the coping was difficult it was the world that had to change, not Horace. He had written God's own quantity of material of all kinds, and among the comic scenarios and the radio scripts and the true detectives there were a few sf stories—not bad, but not great—and a couple of outstanding fantasies: "Trouble with Water," and above all a fine, tingly novel called None but Lucifer (which, for reasons which cannot possibly be any good, has never appeared in book form, to everyone's loss).