Since I happened to be the lucky editor who published Larry Niven’s first story, I’ve been asked to tell a little bit about him, which I’m glad to do. Let me tell you about that first story . . . but forgive me if I start by explaining something about my own editorial practices.

When I was editing Galaxy and If in the 1960s I had made it a condition of employment that no one was to expect me to spend much time in the office of the publishing company. I was willing to appear now and then—one afternoon a week wasn’t objectionable—but that was as far as I would go. Between times I had an assistant to sit at a desk in the office for the purpose of answering the telephone and dealing with whatever routine things had to be dealt with. (For most of that time my assistant was a young woman named Judy-Lynn Benjamin, later Judy-Lynn del Rey, who went on to considerably better things later on—Del Rey Books is named after her.) One of Judy-Lynn’s jobs was to go through the week’s accumulations of w~isolicited manuscripts by unknown writers (unflatteringly called “the slush pile”) for me. She wasn’t to read them—I have always read everything that was submitted to me myself, on the grounds that, as Frank Munsey once said, no magazine can survive the mistakes of more than one person—but Judy-Lynn took the stories out of the envelopes they arrived in, clipped rejection slips on them, put them in return envelopes with postage attached and stacked them up, unsealed, for me to pick up when I came in. Then, in the smoking car of the train back to the Jersey Shore each week, I read the fifty or a hundred stories that had turned up in that week’s slush. There would generally be a handful that required some sort of letter to the author, and, if I was very lucky, one or two that I could actually buy. All the rest I sealed up and dropped into the mailbox at the Red Bank train station, and that was the end of that. One doesn’t expect much out of the slush, you see. One is generally right about that, too.

So it was on just such a train ride, somewhere between Newark and Matawan, that I pulled out of its envelope a slim little manuscript called “The Coldest Place,” by some previously unknown person who said his name was Larry Niven.

That manuscript didn’t get mailed back. “The Coldest Place” wasn’t a great story. But it had a number of good things going for it. It started with a clever science-based idea—the “coldest place” of the title, paradoxically, was on the dark side of the very hottest planet in the solar system, Mercury—and the writing was competent enough, and besides the story was beautifully short. (I was always particularly looking for short stories, because—since we paid by the word—all those savvy professional writers had learned early that they ate better if they wrote long ones.)

So I kept that story out, and wrote a letter to the author saying I would be happy to buy it (for very little money, to be sure), and asked him a few questions about himself. And by return mail he answered that he’d take the offer and, yes, he had never sold a story before so I could call it a “first.” I put the check through, and marked it up for the printer, and all was well.

Or so I thought.

You never know, though, do you? There was a wholly unexpected development. Just at that time some busybody scientists, who should have found some more productive use for their time, were conducting radar studies of Mercury. They came up with the surprising (and just at that moment really unwelcome) information that the planet did not always present the same face to the Sun, as everyone (including Larry and I) had always thought. The damn thing revolved. It didn’t have a “coldest place.”

It was evident that Larry Niven read the same journals as I did, because a day or two later I got a worried letter from him to say that he’d just discovered his story had turned out to be scientifically wrong, and should he give the money back?

By then I had been giving the question some hard thought at my end. There was a kind of moral question involved. I believe that science-fiction writers have a duty to be careful about the science in their stories (and over the years I rejected a good many otherwise good stories, most of which sold elsewhere, because of scientific flaws).

On the other hand, I don’t believe that science-fiction writers have to be more right than the scientists themselves are. Larry had done his homework. At the time he had written “The Coldest Place” the science in it was fine; it wasn’t his fault that the scientists had changed their minds. (We can still read, for instance, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom stories with as much pleasure as ever, in spite of the fact that the Percival Lowell picture that he based them on of a somewhat habitable Mars turned out to be all wrong.) Besides, for any writer his very first sale is a major landmark, and I didn’t have the heart to ask him to unsell it.

In any case, the story was already well along in the assembly line, and so I let it go through and it appeared as written. No one seemed to mind.

The key thing that struck me about Larry was that he not only wrote well, he had gone to the trouble of getting his science right, and even of making the science an important part of his stories. He still does. Larry is a member of that sub-class of the class of science-fiction writers which

I particularly admire: He doesn’t just like science fiction, he likes science, and he even does his best to keep up with and understand it.

Finding somebody like Larry Niven was a delight for me, because I could suggest science-based story ideas to him, and rely on him to make the most of them. He was a natural. Writing science fiction asks more of an author than getting the science right; the characters have to be good, the settings have to be imaginative, the societies and psychologies involved need to be worked out carefully and consistently. Larry was fine in all those ways.

For instance: Neutron stars were a new discovery in the 1960s, so I suggested he write a story about a neutron star. He sat right down and wrote it, and he put into it some grand picaresque characters with intriguing plot problems. Between us we thought of a wonderful title for the story about the neutron star—we called it “Neutron Star’ ‘—and it won him his first Hugo the following year. A little later Freeman Dyson, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, came out with his suggestion that a truly advanced civilization would want to capture all the energy radiated from its parent star by building a sort of shell around the star to trap it for their use—what came to be called a “Dyson sphere.” And of course I immediately asked Larry to write me one of those.

I’m sorry to say that I never got to print that one. The magazines I edited were sold to another publisher around then, and I didn’t want to go along. Actually, the story never quite got written quite the way Dyson had in mind, either, because when Larry got down to serious thinking about it he redesigned the concept. Instead of a sphere, the artifact became a sort of hula-hoop around the star, peopled with Larry’s always intriguing aliens. He called the story that came out of it RINGWORLD, and it remains one of his best novels.

I think I did one other important thing for Larry Niven around that time. I wanted to encourage his interest in science—not that he needed much encouragement—and, most of all, to make it easier for him to keep in touch with the up-to-the-minute developments, even the developments that hadn’t quite happened yet, by getting a chance to talk with some of the actual scientists who were doing the latest research. So I suggested to him a couple of research establishments he might want to visit, and in particular recommended he go and talk to some of my friends in the Artificial Intelligence labs at MIT.

I suspect that that was Larry’s first encounter with the MIT people, which led to coming to know the MIT Science Fiction Society. . . which led to his meeting a member who chanced to be a pretty young female fan called “Fuzzy Pink.” A few years later I was delighted to be an

usher at the wedding which transformed Fuzzy Pink into Mrs. Marilyn Niven—a marriage which still sturdily survives and shows every sign of having been made in heaven.

You will have noted from the above evidence of one of the great character flaws shared by almost all editors: They love to brag about the writers they have “discovered,” and the ways in which through their fond parental guidance and instruction the writers attained success.

Partly that’s jealousy; a successful writer generally winds up with a lot more success than the editor who buys his stories. Editors have expense accounts, but writers have more fun. (That’s the main reason why, years ago, after decades of being a split personality as both editor and writer, I finally gave up editing entirely and went straight.)

The fact is that editors aren’t always as important as they think they are. Actually, very few good writers need to be discovered. They discover themselves. They write. They keep on writing. They do their best to get better at writing with everything they write, and they send out what they have written to people who may want to publish it; and they keep on doing those things, no matter what. They may have to endure periods of accumulating rejection slips and unrewarded effort, but if they are any good at all somebody or other, sooner or later, will notice, and publish, and then they’re on their way.

And yet it may be that, to some small extent, Larry Niven was an exception to that general rule.

The special circumstance in Larry’s case was that his family were quite important to him. They were also quite hard-headed about what sort of careers their offspring chose to devote their lives to, and they didn’t really thrill to his fascination with science fiction. They had viewed with no great pleasure his devotion to reading all those crazy science-fiction stories from an early age, and they took active alarm when he told them he had decided to make a profession out of writing the stuff.

So when he proudly showed them that first tiny check for “The Coldest Place” they were probably moderately pleased, but they certainly were not greatly impressed by the amount. Fortunately, things soon began to get better. As it happened, the second story I bought from Larry was a little longer and I was able to up the rate a bit, so the check was several times as big as the first . . . and the third also got a rate raise and was a good deal longer still and thus the payment check grew accordingly…and, all in all, it turned out that he was getting better paid by an order of magnitude or so with each new sale.

Well, that didn’t go on forever. Still, it had its uses. “That sort of growth impressed them,” he told me later. “From then on I didn’t have to worry as much about opposition from my family, and so I could get on with writing in a more supportive environment.”

As it happens, that subject came up again just a few months ago. I didn’t bring it up. Larry did. We were on a panel in Pasadena, California, discussing the future of space exploration; we had all just been spending a wonderful weekend at the Jet Propulsion Labs to watch the pictures from the flyby of Neptune come in. We were accordingly all juiced up and, for once, happy about the way the world was going—and, during a lull in the debate, Larry leaned over to me and whispered, “You know something, Fred? I think you’re entitled to about half the credit for my whole career.”

I whispered back, “Thank you. Does that mean half the money, too?”

“No, no,” he said, “just half the credit. But thanks.”

—Frederik Pohl