writer named Stanley G. Weinbaum, turned up there long before he was seen in any other magazines. Weinbaum was great; his first story, "A Martian Odyssey," still appears on most lists of all-time best science fiction. Well it should. Weinbaum invented in it a character of a sort no one had thought to create before, an ostrich-shaped alien creature named Tweel who didn't think, talk, act, or look like a human, but was nevertheless a person . All other writers in the field, once the egg had been demonstrated to stand on its end, immediately began to invent personalized alien creatures of their own, and have continued to do so ever since. The other thing that made Wonder attractive was that they had mighty nice rejection slips. From Astounding I never even saw a slip, just the penny postcard that told me to come and carry away another corpse, but most magazines printed up little three-by-five or so forms, along the general lines of
We regret that your submitted material is not suitable for our needs at this time, but thank you for submitting it.
—THE EDITORS
Wonder 's were nothing like that. I usually wrote very short stories, hardly having the confidence to tackle anything much over two thousand words, and so it seemed to me more than once that Wonder's rejections were longer than the stories concerned. There was a form letter signed by Hugo himself, benignly explaining how strict his standards were. There was a printed check-off sheet, listing thirty or so reasons for rejection:
( ) Plot stale
( ) Errors in science
( ) Material offensive to moral standards
and lots more. And, to take the sting out of it, there was a jolly little "translation" of a "Chinese rejection slip." ("Your honorable contribution is so breathtakingly excellent that we do not dare publish it, since it would set a standard no other writer would be able to reach.") It was almost fun to be rejected by Wonder . Impersonal fun, though. Hugo Gernsback was by no means as gregarious a personality as F. Orlin Tremaine.
Their offices were on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, and Dirk and I hiked over there from Brooklyn Tech a time or two. We milled around in the anteroom, under the original oil paintings of covers from his gadget and radio magazines, but we never got past the reception desk. After about two visits the girl made it clear to us that we never would, and so for submissions to Wonder I scraped up stamp money.
I never got past the reception desk at Amazing , either, but T. O'Conor Sloane, Ph.D., did something for me no other editor had done. He made me a pro. Sloane was quite an old man, white-bearded and infirm of gait. He was a marvel to me just on account of age—my own grandfather, who died around that time, was only in his sixties, and Sloane was at least a decade or two past that. But he was amiable and cordial enough; he would totter out to meet me, chat for a moment, and retire with that week's offering in his hand.
His talent as a science-fiction editor was not, I am sorry to say, marked. His scientific attitudes had been fixed somewhere around the rosy twilight of his career, say 1910, and anything since then he dismissed as fantasy. He put himself firmly on record as denying that any human being would ever leave the surface of the Earth in a spaceship, and to us Skylark addicts that was diagnostically treason. What he published was a queer mix of flamboyant space adventure and barely imaginative stories of exploration, all heavily weighted with his interminably balanced blurbs, editorials, and comments on letters.
I cannot resist describing one set of the space adventures for you. They began with a story called "The Jameson Satellite," written by Neil R. Jones. "The Jameson Satellite" was about a very rich university professor who had nothing much to do with his money and nobody to leave it to. He decided to use it to make himself the dandiest tomb a fellow could have, and so he built in his backyard a
We regret that your submitted material is not suitable for our needs at this time, but thank you for submitting it.
—THE EDITORS
Wonder 's were nothing like that. I usually wrote very short stories, hardly having the confidence to tackle anything much over two thousand words, and so it seemed to me more than once that Wonder's rejections were longer than the stories concerned. There was a form letter signed by Hugo himself, benignly explaining how strict his standards were. There was a printed check-off sheet, listing thirty or so reasons for rejection:
( ) Plot stale
( ) Errors in science
( ) Material offensive to moral standards
and lots more. And, to take the sting out of it, there was a jolly little "translation" of a "Chinese rejection slip." ("Your honorable contribution is so breathtakingly excellent that we do not dare publish it, since it would set a standard no other writer would be able to reach.") It was almost fun to be rejected by Wonder . Impersonal fun, though. Hugo Gernsback was by no means as gregarious a personality as F. Orlin Tremaine.
Their offices were on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, and Dirk and I hiked over there from Brooklyn Tech a time or two. We milled around in the anteroom, under the original oil paintings of covers from his gadget and radio magazines, but we never got past the reception desk. After about two visits the girl made it clear to us that we never would, and so for submissions to Wonder I scraped up stamp money.
I never got past the reception desk at Amazing , either, but T. O'Conor Sloane, Ph.D., did something for me no other editor had done. He made me a pro. Sloane was quite an old man, white-bearded and infirm of gait. He was a marvel to me just on account of age—my own grandfather, who died around that time, was only in his sixties, and Sloane was at least a decade or two past that. But he was amiable and cordial enough; he would totter out to meet me, chat for a moment, and retire with that week's offering in his hand.
His talent as a science-fiction editor was not, I am sorry to say, marked. His scientific attitudes had been fixed somewhere around the rosy twilight of his career, say 1910, and anything since then he dismissed as fantasy. He put himself firmly on record as denying that any human being would ever leave the surface of the Earth in a spaceship, and to us Skylark addicts that was diagnostically treason. What he published was a queer mix of flamboyant space adventure and barely imaginative stories of exploration, all heavily weighted with his interminably balanced blurbs, editorials, and comments on letters.
I cannot resist describing one set of the space adventures for you. They began with a story called "The Jameson Satellite," written by Neil R. Jones. "The Jameson Satellite" was about a very rich university professor who had nothing much to do with his money and nobody to leave it to. He decided to use it to make himself the dandiest tomb a fellow could have, and so he built in his backyard a
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