creditable mysteries in the Chandler vein. Gossip had it that he had taken over Palmer’s job mainly in the hope, never realized, of talking Ziff-Davis into letting him edit a mystery magazine as well.
By the time Browne had been on the job a couple of years my own tastes in reading had grown more mature, and I was no longer very enamored of the work of Alexander Blade and his pseudonymous colleagues. Truth to tell, I had come to think of Amazing and Fantastic Adventures as pretty awful magazines, and, with the high-minded fastidiousness common to young men in their mid-teens, said so very bluntly in a 1952 article that I wrote for an amateur magazine of s-f commentary named Fantastic Worlds. They were, I said, “the two poorest professional magazines of the field,” magazines of “drab degeneracy” that were devoted to “a formula of adventure and ‘cops and robbers on the moon.’” I said a lot of other things too, some of them fairly foolish. Fantastic Worlds allowed Browne to reply to my diatribe, and he did so quite graciously, under the circumstances, defending himself by pointing out that “magazines, like bean soup and bicycles, are put out to make money.” He offered reasoned and reasonable arguments for his editorial policies and in general resisted matching my intemperate tone. He did call my piece “unrealistic and irresponsible” but added that “it is axiomatic that only the very young and very old know everything,” and obviously I belonged to one of those two categories.
We now jump three years. It is the summer of 1955, and, thanks to Randall Garrett, I have unexpectedly become part of Howard Browne’s stable of writers myself, turning in a monthly quota of formula fiction. I would deliver a story on Tuesday or Wednesday, Howard would let the accounting department know, and the following Monday my payment would go out. He rarely bothered to read them. Now and then he would check to see that I was maintaining the minimal level of competence that the magazines required, but he understood that I was, by and large, capable of consistently giving him the right stuff. In fact, after I had been part of his staff for six months or so, he paid me the considerable compliment of asking me to write a story around a cover painting that Ed Valigursky, one of his best artists, had just brought in.
The painting showed two attractive young ladies in short tunics fiercely wrestling atop a huge diamond. I produced a 10,000-word story called “Guardian of the Crystal Gate,” which Howard published in the August, 1956 issue of Fantastic, the successor to the old Fantastic Adventures. My name was prominently featured on the front cover and an autobiographical sketch of me, along with a lovely drawing of me as the beardless young man I still was, went on the second page of the issue.
During one of my visits to the Ziff-Davis office about this time, Howard Browne greeted me with a sly grin and pulled a small white magazine from his desk drawer. “Does this look familiar?” he said, or words to that effect. It was that 1952 issue of Fantastic Worlds, with my blistering attack on the magazines he edited. He had known all along that the bright young man he had hired for his staff in 1955 was the author of that overheated polemic of three years before, and finally he could no longer resist letting me in on that. He had, of course, calculated how old I must have been when I wrote that piece, and had gallantly chosen not to hold my youthful indiscretion against me.
That August 1956 Fantastic was pretty much an all-Silverberg issue, by the way. I had broken my personal record of the month before, because I was the author or co-author of four of the six stories it contained. Besides “Guardian of the Crystal Gate,” there was a collaborative novelet called “The Slow and the Dead,” under the “Robert Randall” byline, and I appeared as “Ralph Burke” with a short entitled “Revolt of the Synthetics.” The
By the time Browne had been on the job a couple of years my own tastes in reading had grown more mature, and I was no longer very enamored of the work of Alexander Blade and his pseudonymous colleagues. Truth to tell, I had come to think of Amazing and Fantastic Adventures as pretty awful magazines, and, with the high-minded fastidiousness common to young men in their mid-teens, said so very bluntly in a 1952 article that I wrote for an amateur magazine of s-f commentary named Fantastic Worlds. They were, I said, “the two poorest professional magazines of the field,” magazines of “drab degeneracy” that were devoted to “a formula of adventure and ‘cops and robbers on the moon.’” I said a lot of other things too, some of them fairly foolish. Fantastic Worlds allowed Browne to reply to my diatribe, and he did so quite graciously, under the circumstances, defending himself by pointing out that “magazines, like bean soup and bicycles, are put out to make money.” He offered reasoned and reasonable arguments for his editorial policies and in general resisted matching my intemperate tone. He did call my piece “unrealistic and irresponsible” but added that “it is axiomatic that only the very young and very old know everything,” and obviously I belonged to one of those two categories.
We now jump three years. It is the summer of 1955, and, thanks to Randall Garrett, I have unexpectedly become part of Howard Browne’s stable of writers myself, turning in a monthly quota of formula fiction. I would deliver a story on Tuesday or Wednesday, Howard would let the accounting department know, and the following Monday my payment would go out. He rarely bothered to read them. Now and then he would check to see that I was maintaining the minimal level of competence that the magazines required, but he understood that I was, by and large, capable of consistently giving him the right stuff. In fact, after I had been part of his staff for six months or so, he paid me the considerable compliment of asking me to write a story around a cover painting that Ed Valigursky, one of his best artists, had just brought in.
The painting showed two attractive young ladies in short tunics fiercely wrestling atop a huge diamond. I produced a 10,000-word story called “Guardian of the Crystal Gate,” which Howard published in the August, 1956 issue of Fantastic, the successor to the old Fantastic Adventures. My name was prominently featured on the front cover and an autobiographical sketch of me, along with a lovely drawing of me as the beardless young man I still was, went on the second page of the issue.
During one of my visits to the Ziff-Davis office about this time, Howard Browne greeted me with a sly grin and pulled a small white magazine from his desk drawer. “Does this look familiar?” he said, or words to that effect. It was that 1952 issue of Fantastic Worlds, with my blistering attack on the magazines he edited. He had known all along that the bright young man he had hired for his staff in 1955 was the author of that overheated polemic of three years before, and finally he could no longer resist letting me in on that. He had, of course, calculated how old I must have been when I wrote that piece, and had gallantly chosen not to hold my youthful indiscretion against me.
That August 1956 Fantastic was pretty much an all-Silverberg issue, by the way. I had broken my personal record of the month before, because I was the author or co-author of four of the six stories it contained. Besides “Guardian of the Crystal Gate,” there was a collaborative novelet called “The Slow and the Dead,” under the “Robert Randall” byline, and I appeared as “Ralph Burke” with a short entitled “Revolt of the Synthetics.” The
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