Four Science Fiction Masters: Lost Interviews with Herbert, Pohl, Simak & Dickson

By D. R. Martin

This book includes lost interviews with four masters of post-war American science fiction. Frank Herbert was the creator of the spectacularly popular DUNE series of novels. Frederik Pohl wrote powerful and provocative SF for nearly seven decades and was one of the genre's top editors for much of that time. When he wasn't doing his day job in science journalism, Clifford Simak created thoughtful, graceful SF of a pastoral kind. Gordon Dickson was one of speculative fiction's most prolific writers, covering everything from hard SF to whimsical fantasy. This compact volume catches them all in their primes, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Conger Road Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386527695

Book preview

Foreword

The first real books that I remember reading when I was a kid—books without big type and pictures—were the space adventures of Robert Heinlein, Alan E. Nourse, and Isaac Asimov, as well as the Tom Swift series. Here I was, an ordinary youngster of the 1960s, zooming off to the planets and stars to have all manner of amazing adventures. How great was that ? The summer vacation was a particularly pleasurable time to hike (or bike) off to the public library and pick out science fiction (SF) extravaganzas with which to while away the indolent, delicious days of no school. (This was decades before the age of over-programmed children.) I’m sure I read just about every juvenile SF title in our little neighborhood library, so I moved on to the grown-up works of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Simak, Pohl, Bradbury, and the other big stars. SF was so compelling, so wondrous, that it comprised the vast majority of the literature I read until I was almost 40.

In fact, I managed to make a sideline of science fiction (and fantasy) after I became a professional journalist. I reviewed SF and fantasy books for both my college newspaper and the weekly I later ended up editing. Beginning in 1980, I served as the science fiction/fantasy book reviewer for the Minneapolis Star/Tribune newspaper. Over fourteen years I wrote up nearly 800 books. (For each volume reviewed I received the princely sum of $25, or about $2.50 an hour. Well, who ever said that wealth came with glamour?)

Along the way I had opportunities to interview a few of the big names in science fiction. Two of them lived in Minneapolis—Clifford D. Simak and Gordon R. Dickson. Two others passed through town on book tours—Frank Herbert and Frederik Pohl. I’d quite forgotten about these interviews until a few months ago, when I was cleaning out some old files. There were the mildewy transcripts of five interviews, plus one published article. I read through all of them in a couple of hours.

These guys were giants in the SF field. It occurred to me, in this new era of the e-book, that getting these old interviews out into the light of day could be of interest not only to their thousands of fans, but to any students of SF who might find their insights from the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era useful to have. One thing that particularly strikes me is how often these SF masters—professional soothsayers, you might say—have something prescient to say about the America that we live in today. [Author’s note: When I wrote this forward in 2011 Fred Pohl was still alive. He passed away in 2013.]

I’ve included both the published interview with Frank Herbert and the raw interview transcript. There are also the two raw interviews that I did with Clifford Simak; my raw interview with Fred Pohl; and my raw interview with Gordon R. Dickson. All the raw interviews are left as close as possible to what these great writers said. They are only touched up here and there for purposes of clarity. The interviews with Simak, Pohl, and Dickson were all published as magazine articles. But I don’t remember which publications they were in, and therefore I am unable to track them down.

D. R. Martin

Chapter One

Frank Herbert: World-Builder Extraordinaire

Introduction: Few science fiction books have had an impact on me as great as Frank Herbert’s Dune . This epic of a weirdly alien humanity that has forgotten all about earth was and remains one of the greatest examples of world-building in the history of science fiction. I remember reading the book feverishly in my cramped, dingy student apartment during a summer heat wave. Sitting there on my bed, savoring the blast of my window fan, I plowed through the dense, vivid adventure in just a few days. And after I was done, I knew that I’d never look at science fiction in quite the same way again.

Cut to 1977. I was editing a weekly newspaper in Minneapolis called the Twin Cities Reader. Complimentary books and records arrived on my desk every day of the week, along with all the press flackery that accompanied them. Amidst the deluge was a press release announcing that Frank Herbert (1920-1986) would be coming to Minneapolis on a promotional tour. As the editor of the rag, I could assign an interview to anyone I wanted. And I assigned me.

I met the bearded, jovial author at the Northstar Inn in downtown Minneapolis, on a wet, cold March day. We had lunch in the Rosewood Room restaurant (long gone, alas). Joel Warren—now a top movie and TV still photographer in LA—grabbed some shots of the writer in his hotel room, among them the one that I include here. And then I got my tape recorder rolling, for an hour-plus conversation with Dune’s creator. Herbert had time to kill before going to the airport, so afterwards we went out for a walk in the light drizzle.

Dune won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. 

First up is the published Twin Cities Reader article of April 22, 1977. After that comes the complete raw interview.

Frank Herbert & Dune: Giving Readers their Money’s Worth

It is a mysterious business, creating worlds out of words. I hope I can say without irreverence that anyone who has done it knows why Jehovah took Sunday off. —Ursula K. Le Guin in the Forward to the 1977 edition of Rocannon’s World

By D. R. Martin

Science fiction and fantasy writers as a matter of course create worlds when they write: Hospitable and inhospitable worlds, human and non-human worlds, primitive and sophisticated worlds, accursed and enchanted worlds, hot and cold worlds, wet and dry worlds, all manner of worlds. Every short story, every paperback novel that claims to be science fiction or fantasy requires some kind of a new world, something that no reader’s ever before heard of. But typically, and not very surprisingly, most of this world-creating is strictly matter-of-course, mediocre, slapdash. A new planet or new society or new sentient race gets thrown together, with little explanation or rationalization, because its author doesn’t have the space or skill or time for its fleshing-out. The world, without benefit of a sense of history and identity, becomes a purely theatrical backdrop in front of which characters (who seldom exhibit any depth of characterization) cavort. And therein lies the test that separates science fiction’s boys and girls from its men and women.

It’s sad to say that not more than a handful of science fiction and fantasy writers have managed to create real worlds out of words, worlds that ring true. And among those not more than three or four come close to deserving Sunday off: Ursula Le Guin, author of The Dispossessed and the superlative The Left Hand of Darkness, is one; so is Kate Wilhelm and the late J.R.R. Tolkien; and a stocky, bearded former San Francisco newspaper man named Frank Herbert, whose Dune trilogy is the science fiction phenomenon of the decade, to the ’70s what Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was to the ’60s.

Worldwide, Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune have sold over three million copies [as of 1977, with many millions more sold since then], and that doesn’t take into account Children of Dune’s new printings and foreign translations. Children of Dune, which was