DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Frederik Pohl. The Famous Writers School taught me how to know when I was a writer. I knew it when I saw the check.

It was signed by Frederik Pohl.

Fred bought my first four stories, and many others, for the Galaxy chain. The third was a novella called “Relic of Empire.” He retitled it “World of Ptavvs,” got Jack Gaughan to do a stack of interior illos for it, and paid in peanuts. He also took it to Betty Ballantine (the science fiction arm of Ballantine Books) and suggested that it could become a novel.

Fred has figured large in my life.

He was an usher at my wedding.

At my first science fiction convention I was a lost neofan; but a writer too, because Fred Pohl knew me.

Early on, he suggested that I write stories about odd astrophysical domains: very hot and cool stars, hypermasses, Hal Clement’s kind of thing; we’d pair them with articles on the same, and paintings . . . That notion fell through, but he set me to looking for the odd pockets in the universe.

When Fred left the Galaxy chain, someone should have warned me to go with him. His replacement, Ejler Jakobssen, was a recycled editor from “pulps” days. Ejler rejected a story months after “buying” it (saying he’d take it, but not sending a check). He “bought” THE FLYING SORCERERS as a four-part serial, demanded references for all of the Tuckerized friends in the book (which ruined all the jokes for me), then rejected the first section! Then rejected the rest. I’d heard horror tales about the days of the pulps. I got to live through them.

Milford Writers’ Conferences. Tradition says that a novice writer learns nothing from a writer’s conference.

I knew this. I attended the Milford Conferences hosted by Kate Wilhelm Knight and Damon Knight; but for fear of losing my ability to write, I skipped every other year. Presently I dropped out, or was dropped; my memory won’t tell me which.

The Milford conferences were serious. Each attendee brought several copies of at least one manuscript. During the day the others would read

it. The attendees would gather in a Vicious Circle to offer comments, criticism, suggestions.

Of three stories I took to Milford (and Madeira Beach, when the Knights moved there) only one was improved. That was “For a Foggy Night.”

It’s still true that the Milford Conferences were different. My urge to write did not die because I went to Milford. On the contrary, I always enjoyed myself; I always went home inspired, one way or another; and I met people I’d wanted to know since I was a little boy.

James Blish brought the first section of a novel, A Torrent of Faces, and described what he had planned for the rest. An asteroid is due for collision with Earth . . . an Earth inhabited by a trillion people, with no margin of error for any such catastrophe. Bombs are placed to blow away pieces of the rock; lasers fired from the Moon are to boil away some of the surface; but too much of it will touch down.

My turn. “Suppose you fire those lasers at just one side of the body? Boil one side. Vapor pressure, law of reaction. Couldn’t you cause it to miss the Earth?”

Blish said, “I hope not.”

It took me a moment to join the laughter. . . to realize that I’d suggested a way to shoot down the plot for his novel!

But Blish did what a professional would do (and I learned by seeing what he did). He made the laser just powerful enough to shift the impact point of the meteoroid from Chicago to a place not so heavily populated and it still destroyed too much.

Arthur C. Clarke brought a Questar telescope and set it up on the Knights’ porch. It was early afternoon and we all took turns looking at Venus.

Many years later, during a radio interview in Los Angeles, Arthur was asked, “Who’s your favorite writer?” You know the answer to that, surely. You can’t name one, or many; you’ll offend all the rest.

He said, “Larry Niven.” And apologized to Jerry Pournelle that night at a Pournelle party.

But Jerry tells a similar tale, and in fact lots of us can do so. Arthur Clarke is the kind of man you want to kill someone for, just so he knows.

I’d discovered Lester del Rey’s juveniles at the same time as Robert Heinlein’s. Here he was in the flesh, generating wicked arguments on every possible topic.

I met Piers Anthony at the Madeira Beach avatar of KnightCon, but we never got to talking. We got a dialogue going many years later, because I sent him a fan letter after reading Omnivore.

Gordon Dickson and Others talked about working for an agency for reading fees. He spoke of a novice writer whose wonderful characters never got involved in anything like a story, and another who mistook funny hats for characterization. They never got the point, and the readers-for-hire never stopped caring . . . and were not allowed to tell anyone to quit.

Harlan Ellison wanted unqualified praise. Any suggestion that a story could be improved was met with verbal vitriol. The circle of critics saw a lot of that. This grated. If a story didn’t need fixing, why bring it?

Then again, he brought very good stories, and his suggestions for improving others’ stories were pointed and useful.

Years later, my whole attitude flipflopped.

I sent “Inconstant Moon” to Damon Knight for Orbit. He rejected it.

Damon Knight was then one of the foremost critics of speculative fiction. The other was James Blish. Judith Merril was taking a break; Algis Budrys was making a reputation; Spider Robinson didn’t exist. And Orbit was definitive: it was the literary end of the spec~fic spectrum throughout the New Wave period.

What I write was never New Wave; but there’s never been a time when I didn’t want to expand my skills. I thought I’d made it this time. A solid study of character; no visible hardware; a love story. “Inconstant Moon” was New Wave for sure, even if I was writing in complete sentences.

I recently unearthed Damon’s long rejection letter. He made a good deal of sense, more than I remembered. Even a Hugo Award—winning story can be improved.

At the time I was furious. I questioned his critical skill. This story was perfect, and only an idiot would have questioned etc.

Maybe a writer needs that much arrogance. Else he’ll never send out his first story, never make his first sale.

Judy-Lynn del Rey. Judy-Lynn Benjamin entered the field as an editor under Fred Pohi at Galaxy Science Fiction. When Fred quit, she continued with Ejier Jakobssen for awhile. She wound up at Ballantine Books and became one of the most powerful editors in the field.

She was a dwarf. One got over noticing that. She was charming, intelligent, enthusiastic, competent. She was tactful within limits: she generally wouldn’t lie to an author.

She liked stuffed animals. When I introduced her to the cat-tail (see WORLD OUT OF TIME) which Takumi Shibano had brought me from Japan, she fell in love with it. Takumi got me another, and I passed it on.

She wanted to chop hell out of THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE. Jerry and I wouldn’t have that, so the book wound up with Simon & Schuster and Bob Gleason. In later years her comment on that decision was, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She never bid on books at auction. Thus she lost FOOTFALL to Fawcett Books. . . and got it back when Ballantine bought Fawcett!

Let me tell you about the last time I noticed her height.

We were walking along a Philadelphia sidewalk, talking: me and Marilyn and Judy-Lynn and Lester, who is kind of short himself. Suddenly I was sitting on the sidewalk, dazed, hurt, looking up, with blood dripping down my nose from a wedge-shaped notch in my forehead. I saw something massive and metallic hanging over the sidewalk at eyebrow height.

In Philadelphia they put construction equipment where it can bite pedestrians. If I hadn’t been looking down I’d have seen it. As it was, I had to go into the construction site and borrow Kleenex and a Band-Aid.

William Rotsier. Bill was part of the LASFS crowd when I joined. He’s easygoing, curious about his fellow man, easy to get to know. His life follows his whims.

He collects epigrams for what will someday be an enormous volume; meanwhile he sometimes sends them to Reader’s Digest. (“Everything starts as someone’s daydream.” Larry Niven, fifty bucks for five words.)

He’s a photographer . . . of “fumetti,” of bottom-budget movies, of naked ladies. (Of models, that is. Naked ladies? “She gets the benefit of the doubt, just like you, dear.”) At science fiction conventions his tendency was to escort supernaturally beautiful women, “Rotsler women.”

If things get dull at a science fiction convention banquet, look for the cluster of interested, amused, excited people. Bill Rotsler has gotten bored. So he’s started drawing . . . on his notepad, the tablecloth .

When things were slow to start at a banquet some years back, Bill began illustrating the butter dishes. The restaurant must have been dismayed at how many butter dishes went home with the guests. Mine was a dialogue:

“What does a collaborator do?”

“He adds his name to a work which would not otherwise have the luster.”

But I didn’t grab my favorite. It’s “The Memorial Vincent Van Gogh Coffee Cup,” with the handle for an ear and a bandage drawn on the other side!

Once upon a time his whim had him making badges. He made a great many. Some were for sale, for charities. Some, personalized, were for friends. So there were badges labeled Not Larry Pournelle and Not Jerry Niven. I wore Jerry Pournelle’s Voice Coach for awhile, and when I’d got my fair share of fun out of that, I gave it to Jerry’s wife. I wear LARRY NIVEN, Friend of the Great and Near-Great to conventions. (Which are you? Well, if you’re standing close enough to read the badge I no longer wear Have Sex Outside My Species because it’s been too long since THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS, and because I once forgot to take it off when I left the hotel.

You can identify inner-circle fandom by the Rotsler badges.

Tom Doherty. I met Tom Doherty by walking into the Ace party at the World Science Fiction Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, Labor Day weekend 1977. Tom had just taken over at Ace Books.

He met me at the door. He knew my name. He had a good smile and (I tend to notice) an impressively large head, roomy enough for the brain of a blue whale. He was talking to Adele Hull of Pocket Books, and he started to tell me how good she was. . . and caught himself. It occurred to him that he shouldn’t be praising the opposition in front of a solid author.

I said, “I have to tell you, it probably will never cost you a nickel.”

“Why not?”

Oh my God. He didn’t know! And I realized that I was going to have to tell him. Who else would?

So I did. “Nobody deals with Ace Books unless all the other choices are used up. Nobody expects royalties; the advance is it. Overseas money is never reported . .

Tom Doherty is a careful businessman. He didn’t take over Ace without checking first. He checked back for two years and found no complaints lodged against Ace . . . not because there weren’t any, as he thought, but because no writer ever expected to get money due from the old Ace Books.

The encounter with Larry Niven was his second awful shock of the day. He had already met Jerry Pournelle that afternoon.

“I’m Jerry Poumelle, President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and we want to look at your books!”

Tom wound up paying several hundred thousand dollars in back fees to authors.

After he and James Baen parted company with Ace, Tom formed his own company, Tor Books. Then Jim dropped away and formed Baen Books. In this field we tend to train each other.

I see Tom fairly frequently. Once we met at a Boskone (annual Boston convention) and he took Marilyn and me off to Loch Ober, along with his editor, his wife and his daughter. He talked four of us into ordering lobster Savannah.

The lobster is cut open along the back; the meat is cooked, chopped and mixed with herbs, then put back. Lobster Savannah looks like it could heal. These beasts ran three pounds each. I started talking to my dinner:

“Doctor McCoy will see you now.”

“The Federation doesn’t think you can defend yourselves without our aid.”

“Now, wretched bottom-feeder, you will tell us of your troop movements!”

By dinner’s end I had arranged a mutual defense treaty with the baked Alaska. And by the time we reached the hotel, I had been dubbed Speaker-to-Seafood.

The last time Marilyn and I were in New York, I came to realize that Tom had bought me five meals! Though he was only present at two!

I was told early: when you eat with an editor or publisher, that’s who pays the check. It’s surprisingly easy to get used to such a tradition, but enough is enough. Hell, I’d never even sold him a book.

This book started with a phone call from Bob Gleason, one of my favorite editors. He and Tom had got to talking over a dinner and it emerged that Larry Niven was going to have been a published author for twenty-five years, real soon now. Why not publish a retrospective volume? So Bob called.

It sounded good to me.

In May 1989, Tom Doherty and Bob Gleason stayed at my house for a few days before the SFWA Nebula Awards. We did a fair amount of work on the book. And I fed Tom Doherty by cooking several meals.

I even picked up a restaurant check once, by previous negotiation. He tried to back out afterward, but I wouldn’t let him.

We called Don Simpson the Eldritch Doom because of the things he kept in his room. He’s an artist and inventor, of that breed that never gets rich, because he invents new art forms. By the time anything could become successful, he’d be on to something else.

He had a wonderful time with some glass engraving equipment.

I’d been leaving Michelob beer bottles all over the clubhouse: the old lovely vase-shaped bottles too tall to quite fit in a refrigerator. At my fanquet (the banquet given for a LASFS member who has made a professional sale) Don presented me with a beer bottle engraved with Jack Gaughan’s illustration of one of my aliens. I got him to do two more for me, then a Baccarat decanter and some Steuben crystal.

He was in the LASFS then. Later he moved to San Francisco, but I don’t think he gave up his habits.

Frank Gasperik was an oddity. When I met him he was a biker and a hippie and a science fiction fan. Among bikers he carried a guitar and called himself The Minstrel. At science fiction conventions he sang filk.

Jerry and I put him in LUCIFER’S HAMMER as “Mark Czescu.” We put his song in too. He makes a good character. . . though he tends to take over a book, like kudzu.

We put him in FOOTFALL too, as “Harry Reddington,” and commissioned a ballad from him. By then Frank had been through major changes. He’d been rear-ended twice within two weeks while driving two different cars, neither of which had headrests. His insurance company was giving him the runaround and his lawyer told him he’d look better on a witness stand if he didn’t get well too quick. So he was avoiding major efforts to walk normally. It’s all true. . . and Jerry and I screamed at him separately and together until we made him see that he wasn’t being paid enough to stay sick!

We were working near the end of FOOTFALL at my house when Frank phoned about another matter, I told him, “We’re at the poker table deciding Hairy Red’s fate.”

“Give me a heroic death,” he said. So we killed him.

Dan Alderson. Dan is classic. At Jet Propulsion Laboratories they called him their “sane genius.” He designed a program used by most of the Free World countries for deep space probes. Computer nerd, sedentary, white shirt with infinite pens and pencils in a plastic holder in the pocket. Diabetic.

Characteristic cry: “Weep! Wail!”

From Dan came the germ of a short story, “There Is a Tide.” He worked out the exact instability of the Ringworld; it took seven years. I went to him for numbers for the Ringworld meteor defense. He was “Dan Forrester” in LUCIFER’S HAMMER. The list of what Forrester would need after Hammerfall is his, because Jerry asked him. He’s the hero of one of Jerry’s tales of asteroid colonization.

He likes Known Space. He’s published intricately plotted outlines for stories that would vastly extend Known Space if they were written. I’ve described his multiple Ringworld system elsewhere. His extended outline requires putting the Warlock on the Ringworld at one point. When I killed

off the Warlock in THE MAGIC GOES AWAY, Dan had to include the Niven-Pournelle INFERNO in his background, in order to bust the Warlock out!

NOREASCON, 1989: LOUIS WUS BIRTHDAY PARTY

For twenty years Boxboro Fandom threw parties at the Boston regional conventions. Their themes were strange; their promotions imaginative. Now they’ve self-destructed, but they did it with a bang. Their swansong was a tremendous party at the Boston World Science Fiction Convention.

They sequestered the entire second floor of the Hilton Hotel for Friday night. They decorated the halls and rooms to fit environments real and imaginary, with doors designated as displacement booths: a teleport network running world-wide and then some. They called it “Louis Wu’s Birthday Party.”

The advertisements were movie ads altered by Niven quotes. They were everywhere.

They photographed me for an ID badge: RINGWORLD ENGINEER. I smiled a wide-eyed, toothy maniac’s grin for their camera.

The Convention had booked Marilyn for a late panel; but I was at the party the whole time. It was full but never crowded . . . because the Hilton kept it that way, and the crowds waiting to get in reportedly ran around the block.

The Mad Tea Party included a croquet match with stuffed birds for mallets. A chef served vegetable sushi at the Japan site. There was a band, and dancing, in Paris. A kzin wandered about: Drew Sanders in the costume Kathy Sanders made for the 1984 Masquerade. There were several Pierson’s puppeteers in the Kzinti Embassy; one was Kathy’s costume, without Kathy in it, and one was a wonderfully baroque portrait. The Map Room was covered with Ringworld maps and Niven quotes.

And now I’ve got a T-shirt that says they’re too tired to do it again.

At the Boskone convention last Sunday (February 1990) two perpetrators recognized my Ringworld Engineer badge and its maniacal grin. They told me stories:

The Hilton people loved them. Several asked if the Friday party would be repeated Saturday.

Boxboro’s Hotel Liaison was a straight-looking guy who never raised his voice or appeared without a tie: a proper gent. And heck, they were taking the whole second floor! So the Hilton Manager was cooperative. She signed the thick contract without really noticing a clause near the end.

Getting the prop walls for the Kzinti Embassy into the hotel was tough. They’d measured the largest doors—the front lobby doors !—but hadn’t

measured them open. Open, they were too small. Boxboro considered taking them off their hinges, with and without permission. They considered junking the props. They were sure the prop walls wouldn’t come apart; but someone tried it, and they did.

Still, the only feasible way to get them out after the party would be to hack them apart with a chainsaw! That would also allow the debris to fit into a dumpster. So they put it in the contract.

“I can’t believe I let you use a chainsaw at four in the morning!” the Hotel Manager wailed. But she didn’t stop them. It was in the contract.