deeds of the creators
(and events in their lives)

This is intended to grow like the other add-on pages - such as the Diary, the Gazetteer and Fictional Dates - into an expanding tribute to the brilliant eruption of awareness that shone via sf onto humanity during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.  Here, the emphasis will be on the creators as people; what they did and what was done to them in their involvements in the real world.

(As with some other pages, particularly the Fictional Dates, here the topic will spill over from the Old Solar System to the sf greats in general, because I shan't wish to exclude information about an author just because he or she is more interstellar than OSS.)

H G Wells gets his studentship:
    ...In May came the examinations, and when the results were announced... a whole shower of "A" certificates descended on the head of Wells.  An official letter from the Department of Education followed, offering him a studentship at the Normal College of Science in South Kensington with a bursary of a guinea a week, leading on possibly to a degree as Bachelor of Science.  To give oneself to learning, and to be paid for it!  To sit under such famous men as Professor Huxley, Darwin's friend and defender, and Norman Lockyer, the astronomer, who taught at the Great Gallery of Iron on Exhibition Road...  He knew he was crammed with indigestible fact, that he had seen nothing illustrated or demonstrated, and he could only imagine what a laboratory was like.  But he was full of self-confidence.  Science held out to nearly everyone at that time the promise of a new dawn...     [LDHGWp42-3]

Edgar Rice Burroughs at age fifteen was sent to work with his elder brothers on a ranch near Yale, Idaho.
    ...The greenest of ranch hands, young Burroughs began to gain his experience in the most painful ways.  His brothers George and Harry were hard put to find some tasks he could do. 
    ...I did chores, grubbed sage brush and drove a team of bronchos to a sulky plow.  I recall that once, after I unhooked them, they ran away and evidently, not being endowed with any too much intelligence, I hung onto the lines after tripping over a sage brush and was dragged around the country three times on my face...
     "...as I had proven more or less of a flop as a chore boy," Ed noted, "they appointed me mail carrier."  He rode daily to the railroad at American Falls, either on horseback or, if there was freight to bring back, with a team and wagon.  When he went on horseback, he made the round trip of sixty miles in one day...                                                                                        [ERBIP p47, p 49]

ERB tries to join the Rough Riders:
    ...Even on the small ranch in Idaho, so remote from the center of the nation, Ed had become aware of the turbulent events that were arousing the nation, driving Americans to a fever pitch of patriotism.  The sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, had provided a climax to the already tense situation between America and Spain...
    ...Most exciting to him was the news that Theodore Roosevelt had assembled his Rough Riders to join in the battle.  He wrote directly to Roosevelt, volunteering for the Rough Riders; the response was prompt, terse and disappointing:

First Regt. U.S. Vol. Cavalry   
In Camp near                       
San Antonio, Texas,              
May 19th, 1898.                   

Edgar Rice Burroughs, 
Pocatello, Idaho.

Dear sir,

    I wish I could take you in, but I am afraid that the chances of our being over-enlisted forbid my bringing a man from such a distance.

Yours very truly,                   
T. Roosevelt                         
Lt. Col.                                

The typed note bore Roosevelt's sprawling signature.         [IPERBp126-7]

A suddenly difficult year for the young H P Lovecraft:
    ...In 1904 the death of his grandfather brought severe financial hardship to Howard's family, and he and his mother moved into a modest apartment.  Always a sickly child prone to nerves and fatigue, as a fourteen-year-old he fell victim to illness, probably psychologically induced...           [TNAHPLpxxxiii-xxxiv]

A Mr Alden wrote to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in February 1909:
"As the sole surviving witness of the burial of Edgar Allen Poe... and one of the few remaining who have seen him in life, I regret exceedingly that my advanced age and impaired health will prevent me from joining the centenary dinner at which you are to preside.
    "As a then resident of Baltimore, my native city, I often saw Mr. Poe...
    "On a cold dismal October day, so different from the ordinary weather of that clime, I had just left my home when my attention was attracted by an approaching hearse..."
    So the letter continued...  Conan Doyle, as he read it, had moving memories of one of his earliest literary idols.  Edgar Allan Poe, he had already declared, was the supreme original short-story writers of all time.  And he stressed it again, with his tribute to the inventor of the detective story among other things, when he took the chair at the Hotel Métropole dinner to honour the centenary year of Poe's birth.  
                                                                                           [ALOSACDp200]

H G Wells amended Ann Veronica in view of an event of 30th June 1909:  
    ....When he must have been at the point in the story where Ann Veronica declares her love for Capes, for we know that he finished the book at the end of July, something occurred which altered his intention with the story and forced, or perhaps inspired, him to bring it to a sudden and explosive close.  The evidence for this is an event explicitly described in the book and forming the turning-point to the climax: a suffragette raid on the House of Commons which took place on 30 June...
    Of the twenty-seven women who were arrested, twenty-six next morning, after a night in the cells, refused to be bound over and were given prison sentences of up to three months.  Wells makes Ann Veronica one of these...       
                                                             [LDHGWp192]

Edgar Rice Burroughs begins writing the Barsoom saga:

    ...The immediate day-to-day pressure of providing for his growing family left him little time or energy to implement his other creative thoughts and ideas.  In his Autobiography he recorded:

Evidently there was not a job to be had in Chicago.  I got writer's cramp answering blind ads and wore out my shoes chasing after the others.  Then, somehow, I got hold of a few dollars and took an agency for the sale of a lead pencil sharpener and borrowed office space from a friend of mine, Bert Ball, who was a corset jobber with an establishment at the corner of Market and Monroe Streets in Chicago.
    I would not try to sell the lead pencil sharpeners myself, but I advertised for agents and sent them out.  They did not sell any sharpeners, but in the leisure moments, while I was waiting for them to come back to tell me that they had not sold any, I started writing "A Princess of Mars", my first story.

The incredible plot concerning a certain princess on a far-off planet had probably passed through a long period of gestation.  In July 1911 he started writing.  The words flowed swiftly, the details clear and vivid in his mind.
    As the story progressed, the pencil sharpener business ground to a halt and then expired.  Ed went to work for his brother Coleman, who now owned the Champlain-Yardley Company, a firm that in Ed's words "might be grandiloquently described as manufacturing stationers - we made scratch pads."  In the company's office at 222 West Kinzie Street he continued his writing and completed the first half of the story.  On August 14, 1911, he mailed the manuscript, together with an explanatory letter, to Argosy Magazine, New York, preferring to use his business address rather than that of his home on 2008 Park Avenue.
    Of his first story and its submission Ed recalled that at the age of thirty-five (he was within a few weeks of thirty-six) he knew nothing about writing technique, and remarked:

I had never met an editor, or an author or a publisher.  I had no idea how to submit a story or what I could expect to get in payment.  Had I known anything about it at all I would not have thought of submitting half a novel...                  

[ERBIPp182-4]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle disguised himself as the main character in The Lost World, due to be published serially in The Strand magazine edited by Herbert Greenhough Smith, from April to November 1912:
    ...In an immense black beard, with adhesive eyebrows and a wig, he glared out at the camera as Professor Challenger.  There was another picture, showing him seated among three friends who represented Roxton, Summerlee, and Malone.  But the full-face close-up, decorated with a silk hat, was to represent Challenger as an illustration in The Strand.
    "The frown is characteristic," he wrote to Greenhough Smith on February 9th, 1912.  "'The Scowl of the Conans', Sir Walter Scott calls it at the end of one of his novels."
    Greenhough Smith was alarmed.  He said that the disguise, though sufficiently hideous, was not undetectable and might get the magazine into trouble for hoaxing.  "Very well," agreed Conan Doyle three days later.  "Not a word about the photo of Prof. C.  I begin to realize my own audacity.  After all, it is not me..."
    At the same time, he was so pleased with his Challenger disguise that he had to try it on somebody.  Some thirty-odd miles away, the Hornungs and their son Oscar were living at West Grinstead Park... 
    ....Announcing that he was der Herr Doktor von Somebody, this hirsute apparition towered in the doorway.  He said he was a friendt of Herr Doktor Conan Doyle...
    Hornung, fortunately or unfortunately, was short-sighted.  Moreover, he was used to the fact that a friend of his brother-in-law might be anybody from some broken-down tramp to the Prime Minister.  His welcome was effusive.  The visitor, rattling off long strings of German, really did get away with it for several minutes.  Then Hornung was furious...
                                                                               [TLOSACDp219-220]

John Jacob Astor IV, author of A Journey in Other Worlds, was the richest passenger on board the Titanic, and died in the disaster.

In the summer of 1912 Clark Ashton Smith visited his mentor the poet George Sterling in Carmel.

Ray Cummings worked as an assistant to Thomas Alva Edison, 1914-19.

H G Wells at the outbreak of the Great War:
    On 4 August his and Rebecca West's son was born.  He spent that strange Bank Holiday awaiting that event, and when the mother and child were safe and well, and it was plain that Germany was not going to respond to Britain's ultimatum and that Armageddon might indeed be at hand, he sat down late that night to write an article to which he gave the title that was to be taken up as a national catch-word, "The War That Will End War"...               [LDHGWp270]

1915

Olaf Stapledon performed ambulance work with the Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU) on the Western Front in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919.  As a conscientious objector and registered pacifist, he chose a non-combatant role, driving ambulances and carrying wounded men under fire. He served with the French Army's Section Sanitaire Anglaise 13 (SSA 13) and was eventually awarded the French Croix de Guerre for bravery.

C S Lewis was wounded on Mount Bernenchon during the Battle of Arras on 15 April 1918 - by an English shell exploding where it should not have been...                                                                                                           [RLGWHp54-5]
In his autobiography Lewis described the experience:
    ...I found (or thought I found) that I was not breathing and concluded that this was death.  I felt no fear and certainly no courage.  It did not seem to be an occasion for either.  The proposition "Here is a man dying" stood before my mind as dry, as factual, as unemotional as something in a text-book.  It was not even interesting.  The fruit of this experience was that when, some years later, I met Kant's distinction between the Noumenal and the Phenomenal self, it was more to me than an abstraction.  I had tasted it; I had proved that there was a fully conscious "I" whose connections with the "me" of introspection were loose and transitory...                                                          [SBJp159]

In 1919 Edward E Smith was hired as chief chemist for F. W. Stock & Sons of Hillsdale, Michigan, working on doughnut mixes.

Death of H P Lovecraft's mother in Butler's Hospital, Providence, R.I., where his father had died in 1898.  She died after "extended periods of depression and what was then termed hysteria" [TNAHPLpxxxiv].                                                 

H G Wells was the Labour candidate for London University in the General Election of November 1922.  He came bottom of the poll.                   [LDHGWp335]

H G Wells was the Labour candidate for London University in the General Election of December 1923.  He came bottom of the poll.                   [LDHGWp335]

H P Lovecraft moved to New York (2nd March) - to his two years there we owe The Horror At Red Hook - and married Sonia Greene the next day, 3rd March, at St. Patrick's Chapel, Manhattan.

Edgar Rice Burroughs declared his regret that he had caused trouble for his German publisher, Charles Dieck, due to the anti-German sentiments expressed in Tarzan the Untamed and The Land That Time Forgot, which had been composed under the influence of febrile wartime propaganda.
    ...On May 18, in a general statement addressed to the German press, Ed presented a defense both of his novel and of Dieck's role as publisher; he again stressed that Tarzan the Untamed was written "during the heat of an extremely bitter war"...
    "If I have been stupid in not realizing the harm that Tarzan the Untamed might do," he stated, "I have at least tried to remedy the wrong by instructing my publishers and agents to withdraw this book from circulation as rapidly as possible throughout the world and never to offer it again..."  He noted that since his stories were published in twenty countries, his losses would be far greater than any income he could ever derive from German sales.  Ed closed, "I know that the German press wants to be fair.  I do not ask them to be fair to me but I sincerely hope that they will be fair to Mr. Dieck, a fellow German." 
                                                                                                 [ERBIPp610]

Having given up on his marriage to Sonia Greene, H P Lovecraft returns from New York to his native haunt.
    ...Alienated from the city, unable to write, and separated from Greene, he capitulated and returned to Providence in the spring of 1926, where he remained for the rest of his life...                                                             [TNAHPLpxl]

1927

C S Lewis and Norse:
    ...This year Lewis began learning the language of the sagas - "it is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse" - and to Arthur Greeves he wrote, "I am realizing a number of very old dreams in the way of books - reading Sir Gawain in the original [Middle English] and, above all, learning Old Icelandic.  We have a little Icelandic Club in Oxford called the 'Kolbitar': which means (literally) 'Coal-biters', i.e. an Icelandic word for old cronies who sit around the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals.  We have so far read the younger Edda and the Volsung Saga: next term we shall read the Laxdale Saga.  You will be able to imagine what a delight this is to me, and how, even in turning over the pages of my Icelandic Dictionary, the mere name of god or giant catching my eye will sometimes throw me back fifteen years into a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music: only they are now even more beautiful seen through a haze of memory."
                                                                                                        [RLGWHp93]

Journeys of H P Lovecraft, June 1928 (in Massachusetts) and July (beyond):
    ...On the 18th, Lovecraft caught buses to Athol, Massachusetts...  On the 29th, he went to North Wilbraham, Massachusetts, where he had an invitation from the veteran amateur journalist, Edith Dowe Miniter.  Mrs. Miniter lived with her cousin, Evanore Beebe.  The latter was a stout squiress of seventy, who drove about in a buggy and controlled local politics.  She was "fit to be tied" when Lovecraft shoveled sugar into his coffee, leaving an undissolved mass at the bottom.  Lovecraft was delighted to find such antiquities as lard-burning lamps and cat ladders, placed inside chimneys to enable cats to get from one floor to the other...
    These journeys cost Lovecraft little outside of bus fares, because his hosts insisted on giving him bed, board, and entertainment.  His friends later thought that this trip was one of the happiest times of his life.
    After a week at North Wilbraham, Lovecraft wandered around Massachusetts by bus and trolley car and went to Albany, New York.  Thence he took a Hudson River boat to New York...
    July 11th found Lovecraft in Philadelphia again, whence he traveled on to Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washigton.  He took a train to the Shenandoah Valley, where he visited the Endless Caverns:
        ...For over an hour I was led spellbound through illimitable gulfs and chasms of elfin beauty and daemonic mystery - here and there lighted with wondrous effect by concealed lamps, and in other places displaying awesome grottoes and abysses of unconquered night; black bottomless shafts and galleries where hidden winds and waters course eternally out of this world and all possible worlds of mankind, down, down to the sunless secrets of the gnomes and night-gaunts, and the worlds where web-winged monsters  and fabulous gargoyles reign in undisputed horror...                                                                                                              [LABp298]

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), in "Tarzan, John Carter, Mr. Burroughs, and the Long Mad Summer of 1930" (his Introduction to the Porges biography of ERB), is looking back on this year from the Burroughs centenary in 1975:
In the summer of 1930 if you had got off a train and walked up through the green avenues of Waukegan, Illinois, you might have met a mob of boys and girls running the other way.  You might have seen them rushing to drown themselves in the lake or hide themselves in the ravine or pop into theatres to sit out the endless matinees.  Anything, anything at all to escape...
    What?
    Myself.
    Why were they running away from me?  Why was I causing them endless flights, endless hidings-away?  Wat I, then, that unpopular at the age of ten?
    Well, yes, and no.
    You see my problem was Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan and John Carter, Warlord of Mars.
    Problem, you ask.  That doesn't sound like much of a problem.
    Oh, but it was.  You see, I couldn't stop reading those books.  I couldn't stop memorizing them line by line and page by page.  Worst of all, when I saw my friends, I couldn't stop my mouth.  The words just babbled out.  Tarzan this and Jane that, John Carter here and Dejah Thoris there.  And when it wasn't those incredible people it was Tanar of Pellucidar or I was making noises like a tyrannosaurus rex and behaving like a Martian thoat, which, everyone knows, has eight legs.
    Do you begin to understand why in Waukegan, Illinois, the summer of 1930 was so long, so excruciating, so unbearable for everyone?
    Everyone, that is, save me...        
                                                                                                       [ERBIPp17]

Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton travelled down the Mississippi in an open boat.

E Hoffman Price remembers:
    ...Upon my arrival on the Pacific Coast, in mid-April of 1934, Clark Ashton Smih had written to assure me that I'd find him at home any time I could make the 165 mile drive from Oakland to Auburn.  There were two Auburns, the new, and the old town.  The latter was the original gold rush settlement, a mile or so beyond which, and just a piece past the railway tracks, was the road to Smith's home.
    The sound of the Ford and the slam of its door called Smith from the cabin and down the slope.  Tall, thin, fragile, he at once did, and did not resemble the person portrayed by the snapshot he had mailed me before I set out from New Orleans.  I heard and saw, as it were, two Smiths at once...
    ...Clark lived with his parents.  Each was past eighty, and at first sight, seemed old beyond numbering.  The irises of Mr. Smith's eyes had faded to colorlessness, exaggerating the appearance of age.  By no means unfriendly, he was nonetheless reserved, mid-way between noncommittal and remote.
    Mrs. Smith, white-haired, slight, sharp-faced, moved quickly, spoke with animation and sparkle, restoring the balance at once.  And, she lost no time in giving me a tour of the cabin.
    To my right was a comfortable, welcoming kitchen of the sort I remembered from old times, with its wood stove, its dining table, and work table.  To the left, I glanced into the duskiness of Clark's study, which seemed spacious, although it was no more than one of the four quarters of the house, the remaining two being the bedrooms.
    Stepping into her son's workshop, Mrs. Smith pointed out the figures sculptured in talc.  "Clark gets the material from my brother's mine.  When the carving is completed - "  She picked a miniature monster, one of Cthulhu's kinfolk, from atop the bookcase that lined the entire wall.  "He fires it in the kitchen stove..."
                                                                                                               [CASAM]

July 1934:  H G Wells was granted an interview with Stalin.

Wells I am very much obliged to you, Mr Stalin, for agreeing to see me. I was in the United States recently. I had a long conversation with President Roosevelt and tried to ascertain what his leading ideas were. Now I have come to ask you what you are doing to change the world...

Stalin Not so very much.

Wells I wander around the world as a common man and, as a common man, observe what is going on around me...      

[Wells, chairman of PEN, unsuccessfully tried to get Stalin to join this literary society.]

Isaac Asimov in Before the Golden Age (1974) wrote of his attempt in 1935 to apply for entry to Columbia College:
    ...I had decided to go to Columbia for my college education.  It was, after all, in Manhattan, and there was no question of leaving the city.  College or not, I had to continue working in the candy store.
    ...I had applied for entrance, and a date had been fixed for an interview.  It was April 10, 1935...
    I was still only fifteen at the time and had never gone to Manhattan alone.  My father, I think, had visions of me ruining my chance of getting into Columbia by getting lost in the confusing subway system and arriving late for the interview - or not arriving at all.  He therefore actually abandoned the store to my mother and came with me.  Naturally, he waited outside the building I was supposed to enter, because he didn't want to ruin my chances by having me appear to be a baby who could not be trusted to travel on his own.
    He might have saved himself the trouble.  I ruined my chances entirely on my own.  I made a very poor impression.  I was bound to...  too eager, too talkative, too lacking in poise and self-assurance, too obviously immature...
    My interviewer may have been impressed by my scholastic record...  He therefore suggested I attend Seth Low Junior College...
    I tried to put a good face on it to my father when I came out of the building and stoutly maintained that Seth Low "was just as good" and my father stoutly said it was.  I didn't believe it, though, and neither did he...

Eric Frank Russell, acting as assistant to British Interplanetary Society secretary/Treasurer Leslie Johnson, meets Olaf Stapledon:
    ...In the summer of 1935, Russell happened to see a letter of enquiry dated August 7th which had been sent to Johnson by William Olaf Stapledon, at the time a Professor of Philosophy, and extra-mural lecturer in English Literature and Industrial History, at the University of Liverpool, whose epic novel, Last and First Men, recounting the rise and fall of humanity, and its sequel, Last Men in London, had been published to great acclaim a few years previously.  Realizing that here was "a prize worth catching", Russell first arranged for the current issue of the Society's Journal (and as many back issues as were available) to be sent to Stapledon.  Then, after a short interval, he and Johnson headed off to Stapledon's confortable bungalow at Caldy Hill in West Kirby, a town near the southern tip of the Wirral Peninsula overlooking the Dee estuary.  Arriving somewhat tired and dusty, Russell and Johnson were delighted to be warmly received by Stapledon and, once they were refreshed with tea and a light meal, the three men spent a pleasant afternoon discussing what Russell later referred to as "philosophical concepts", with Stapledon explaining that he did not regard his own books as science fiction, but rather as vehicles for philosophical ideas, the resemblance to science fiction being "accidental and irrelevant".  In any event, the outcome of the meeting, as Russell had hoped all along, was that another "big name" signed up for Membership of the B.I.S.
    A couple of years later, when talking to Walter Gillings, Stapledon recalled the meeting, revealing that he had never even come across, let alone read, science fiction magazines until Russell asked what he thought of them on that ssummer afternoon...                                                             [IYTp86]

The various Deeds this year are scattered with several references to the first World Science Fiction Convention.

Arkham House publishers was founded in 1939 in Sauk City, Wisconsin, by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, to publish hardcover editions of the late H P Lovecraft's best works:
    ...Derleth submittted a collection of Lovecraft's stories to Charles Scribner's Sons, which had published several of his own books, and to Simon & Schuster.  Both rejected the proposal; the editor at Simon & Schuster, however, suggested that Derleth and Wandrei publish the book themselves.
    And so they did, calling their company Arkham House after Lovecraft's fictitious New England town.  Derleth raided a bank loan that he had raised for building a house, and Wandrei scraped up a smaller sum.  For their title, they chose The Outside and Others, alluding not only to the story "The Outsider" but also to Lovecraft's feeling of alienation.
    In 1939, Derleth and Wandrei received 1,268 copies of the book, with an elegant jacket by Virgil Finlay.  This was a young artist in Rochester, New York, who had become a distinguished illustrator for Weird Tales and had corresponded with Lovecraft.  The huge book, of xiv + 553 pages of small type, contained nearly a third of a million words.  These included an Introduction by Derleth and Wandrei, thirty-six stories by Lovecraft, and Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature".
    At the first World Science Fiction Convention, in New York in July, 1939, the forthcoming volume was announced at a pre-publication price of $3.50.  After publication, it would cost $5.00...
    Arkham House got 150 advance orders, but the rest of the edition sold so slowly that the original printing remained in print for four years...
                                                                                                [LABp432]   

Eric Frank Russell and his wife Ellen sailed across the Atlantic on the steamer S.S.Aquitania from Southampton to New York; he attended the New York World's Fair and during 2-4 July the first World Science Fiction Convention.

Frederick Pohl on the quarrel with the Futurians [from Wiki]:

In addition to its groundbreaking role as the first of its kind, the convention was noteworthy for the exclusion of a number of politicized Futurians by convention chair Sam Moskowitz; those excluded were Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, John Michel, Robert A. W. Lowndes, Cyril M. Kornbluth, and Jack Gillespie, an event known to fannish historians as "The Great Exclusion Act."    
    According to Pohl, in his autobiography The Way the Future Was, the Futurians held their own counter-convention which was attended by several who went to the regular convention. He also downplayed the aspect that politics played, himself believing that it was a personality conflict between the convention organizers and the Futurians and said "We pretty nearly had it coming," continuing with "What we Futurians made very clear to the rest of New York fandom was that we thought we were better than they were. For some reason that annoyed them."

E Hoffman Price relates another visit to Clark Ashton Smith [see 1934]:
    In 1940, I led the last safari to Smith's place: Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, and Diego del Monte, who wrote for the adventure pulps under the name of Felix Flammonde, were the convoyes; none of them had ever met Smith.  He still lived alone in the cabin he had once shared with his parents.  He was there, unchanged and unswerving.  He had been digging wells.  One of the guests was a Turkish well digger.  We drank rum, diluted with water from the mine shaft.  And this was my final visit to the enchanted area which I could have seen, but did not see as often as many times since that last visit I wished I had...                                                                                                                   [CASAM]

Tiffany Thayer, president of the Fortean Society, following Eric Frank Russell's visit to New York (see 1939), takes surprising action to furnish British Forteans with material:
    ...as a footnote to his New York visit, Tiffany Thayer was so impressed with Russell's enthusiasm for the work of Charles Fort that, in 1941, when the U-boat threat to the Atlantic convoys was nearing its peak, he somehow managed to send Russell a crate of Fort's just published 1125-page Collected Works (Henry Holt & Co., 1941), for sale to members of "The Fortean Society" in Britain, an amazing achievement considering the priorities at the time...    [IYTp144]

Ian Fleming, Rudolf Hess and the black magician:
    All his life Fleming prided himself on knowing the right man to go in any situation.  He usually did, too.  But when Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, made his mysterious parachute descent in Scotland in May 1941, Fleming surpassed himself by appealing to one of the most notorious men in the whole of the British Isles.  For many years he had been fascinated by the legend of wickedness which had attached itself to the name of Aleister Crowley, necromancer, black magician and the Great Beast 666.  This immensely ugly old diabolist and self-advertiser had thrown himself into certain more unsavoury areas of the occult with a gusto that must have appealed to Fleming, and when the interrogators from British Intelligence began trying to make sense of the neurotic and highly superstitious Hess he got the idea that Crowley might be able to help and tracked him down to a place near Torquay, where he was living harmlessly on his own and writing patriotic poetry to encourage the war effort.  He seems to have had no difficulty in persuading the old gentleman to put his gifts at the disposal of the nation, for a brief formal note sealed with cabbalistic signs arrived, through the 'usual channels', for the Director of Naval Intelligence:

    Sir:
        If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by astrology and Magick, my services might be of use to the Department in case he should not be willing to do what you wish.  I have the honour to be, sir,
                Your obedient servant,
                                              ALEISTER CROWLEY

   ...It is a pity that this had to be one of Fleming's bright ideas that never came off: understandably, there was hilarity in the department at the idea of the Great Beast 666 doing his bit for Britain...                           [TLOIFp127-8]

7th December 1941:  Edgar Rice Burroughs witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor, initially mistaking it for a training exercise.

1943

Paul Linebarger [= Cordwainer Smith] was sent to China to co-ordinate military operations and serve as liaison with Chinese leaders.

John W Campbell was investigated by the FBI in 1944 after a story he published in Astounding Science Fiction appeared to contain classified details about the atomic bomb project.  The investigation was initiated when security officials working on the top-secret Manhattan Project noticed the March 1944 short story Deadline by Cleve Cartmill. The story contained references to uranium-235 separation and bomb design which appeared too accurate to be coincidental. 

Walter M Miller took part as tail gunner of a bomber aircraft in the Battle of Monte Cassino, in the first half of 1944.  His part in the destruction of the ancient abbey haunted him and later inspired passages in A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959).

Hollywood director Howard Hawkes, impressed by Leigh Brackett's hard-boiled writing style, asked his secretary to phone "this guy Brackett" to offer a screenwriting job.  Surprised at the subsequent interview to discover that Brackett was a woman, Hawkes nevertheless stuck to his offer, commenting "she writes like a man".

Fred Hoyle in late 1944 sailed from Britain to America with fellow-scientist Frank Westwater - the latter now a naval officer - to attend a conference on radar technology for the war effort:
     Westwater and Hoyle embarked from Greenock, on the Clyde, aboard the Cunard line's RMS Aquitania, together with 7800 American GIs who were returning from Europe for Christmas leave...  A day or so out of Greenock, the twice-sunk Captain Westwater took Hoyle to the stern of the Aquitania and explained what to do if they were torpedoed:  "When a ship is torpedoed, pandemonium reigns and nothing works as it should."  The best plan, he explained, is to ignore the scramble of people rushing to the lifeboats, and make your way instead to the stern.  There, you should slide down one of the many ropes and wait in the water until the ship goes down, at which point an immense amount of flotsam comes up and you can find something to cling on to.  Out in the mid-Atlantic in winter, with thirty-foot waves, Hoyle took little comfort from this advice...
                                                                                             [FHALISp99-100]

February 1945:  Kurt Vonnegut, a prisoner of war who had been captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge, survived the Allied bombing of Dresden in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. 

The October 1945 issue of Wireless World carried Arthur C Clarke's article proposing the use of artificial geostationary satellites as telecommunications relays.

Late in 1945 the Russian sf writer Alexandr Kazantsev visited Hiroshima to observe the site of the first atomic bombing.  He saw parallels with the devastation of the 1908 Tunguska event, leading to his theory that the former was likewise artificial - caused in that case by an alien spaceship that caused a nuclear explosion while attempting to land.

1948

Psychological Warfare, by Paul Linebarger [= Cordwainer Smith], published in 1948, was the authoritative text on the subject for decades.

Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and the Steady State vs Big Bang Theories, the IAU,
Mt Palomar and Edwin Hubble:
    ...The great Palomar 200-inch...  commenced observations in 1948.  Bondi hoped it might make decisive observations, but this was not to be.  The merits of rival theories would have to be fought out in seminars, papers and conferences by passionate argument, rhetoric, appeals to aesthetics, and an Olympian stance by Hoyle as to how research in physics should be conducted.
    Bondi got his first chance to advocate the steady-state theory at the seventh General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), held in Zurrich, Switzerland, from 11 to 18 August 1948.  In the days before air travel became commonplace, international meetings were already a fundamental necessity in astronomy.  No single observatory can see the whole sky, and so astronomers would get together and plan worldwide observing campaigns to get a balanced view of the universe.  Unlike most international scientific meetings, the seventh General Assembly had very few papers: most of the time was devoted to formal and informal meetings of groups of astronomers.
    Christine and Hermann Bondi, as well as Fred Hoyle, were all members of the Union, which had not met for ten years because the world had been at war.  They joined some 300 astronomers from thirty-one countries.  When they arrived in Zurich, the contrast with postwar Britain was striking.  In Britain, for example, food rationing was even harsher than it had ever been during the war, clothes were drab, and gardeners concentrated on growing food.  Here in Switzerland's largest city, it seemed as if every window was bedecked with flowers.  Meetings were held at the magnificent premises of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), which boasted facilities far more modern than those available at Cambridge...
    Hoyle was like a hyperactive child at the Zurich meeting, bobbing into one room after another...  In a meeting of the commissiom on extragalactic astronomy, he met Edwin Hubble for the first time, over tea and cakes during a break.  Hubble spoke informally about the 200-inch telescope, which had been going through trials for four months.  Hubble hoped to start observations of galaxies soon and perhaps obtain data that could discriminate between different theoretical models of the universe...                     [FHALISp122-3]

Roger Lancelyn Green chats about sf with C S Lewis:
    ...The almost weekly meetings with Lewis in 1950 ceased when Green left Oxford at the end of August to live in Cheshire.  But he went with a standing invitation to stay with Lewis each term, and was paying his first visit to the Guest Room at Magdalen on 13 November when he "started reading Lewis's newest story in MS".  He read more of the story the next day, and after dinner in Hall, "back to his rooms where we sat talking until about 12.30: usual sort of subjects - children's books, romances of other worlds; I discoursed upon Edgar Rice Burroughs; we planned a story of a trip to Mercury - but couldn't get very far with it."

[RLGWHp244]

1951

Reaction to publication of The Day of the Triffids:
    ...Its success was immediate and prolonged, to nobody's surprise more than the modest Wyndham, who was having a sherry in a pub one day when he overheard two gardeners discussing their weeds over a pint of beer; one said, "There's one by my tool shed - a great monster.  I reckon it's a triffid!"  The word had entered the language...   
                                                               [Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree (1973), p336] 

Autumn 1953: Ian Fleming began to compose Moonraker.
    ...Fleming's favourite corner of England, "here Caesar had first landed two thousand years before", was ransacked for the book - Kingsdown, where Drax builds his rocket on the cliffs near Deal, "the two-mile stretch of shingle that runs at low tide beneath the towering cliffs to St Margarets' Bay", and the Café Royal in Dover, which was one of Fleming's own favourite haunts...  
    That autumn, as he began preparation for the book he was to write the following January at Goldeneye, Fleming began to share his London life with Bond too.  Blades Club bears traces not only of White's Club, of which Fleming was a member from 1936 to 1940, but of Boodle's and the Portland as well.  He also shared with his hero the same favourite restaurant table in London, "the right-hand corner table for two on the first floor" of Scott's, where Bond sits at the beginning of Chapter 19 of Moonraker, gazing at the traffic down the Haymarket, drinking his second vodka dry martini brought by Baker the head waiter, and awaiting the arrival of the overdue Gala Brand...      
                                                                      [TLOIFp279-80]

 ...late 1954, came the news clipping with a few words penned on the margin: Clark Ashton Smith and Mrs. Carol Dorman had been married in Monterey, and were living in adjacent Pacific Grove.                                           [CASAM] >>1955

E Hoffman Price remembering Clark Ashton Smith:
        ...Early in 1955, I went to see him and his bride.
    Clark was then 62, and seemed older.  His bearing had tapered off, and his enunciation was not as sharp as it had once been.  He was stooped, and frail, and shaky.  In contrast to vibrant and vital Carol, he seemed all the more indrawn and feeble.  Those first few moments in the comfortably cluttered library-living room left me distressed and sad, and groping.  Then came a flash of something from behind the surface.  The Smith-Shadow became Clark Ashton Smith himself, and I was back again with him in 1934, with only this difference - that there was more of him.
    This new Smith was happy in a way he had never been in the old days.  The oldest honeymooners I'd ever met, these were in their mature expression, also the most radiant - the youngest.  The glances they exchanged during pauses in our scramble to blend old memories with the present showed how he and she had found something new and splendid and contenting.
    All this they had, and despite a potentially disastrous background: the former Mrs. Dorman's three teen-agers by an earlier marriage bristled with hostility.  Unspoken antagonism lanced and prodded until I felt that Clark must have attained his equanimity only through long study with a master of Zen.  He was too fully occupied in savoring Carol's presence to have any attention for animosity.  Although the youngsters had to resent the old fellow Mommie had married, they could not knife him into defense or retaliation...     [CASAM]

To pursue his interest in scuba diving and underwater exploration, Arthur C Clarke emigrated to Ceylon in 1956.

Patrick Moore and producer Paul Johnstone prepared for the first transmission of The Sky At Night, April 1957 [explanatory note: the "wurmsers" were moving diagrams made out of cardboard by a Viennese, Alfred Wurmser]:    
    ....Rehearsals seemed to go well.  Even at that stage I had no word-for-word script; Paul trusted me to bring in the visuals (photographs, diagrams and "wurmsers") at the right moments, and otherwise it was up to me.  And so at 10.30 p.m. on the evening of 26 April 1957 I was seated in my chair in the Lime Grove studio waiting for the red light over the television camera to come on.
    Was I nervous?  In a way I suppose I was; I remember thinking "My entire life depends upon what I do during the next fifteen minutes."  Then the screen on the monitor began to glow; I saw the words "The Sky At Night.  A regular monthly programme presented by Patrick Moore", and the series was launched.  It did not then occur to me that I would still be broadcasting more than forty-five years later... 
                                                                   [80 Not Out p30-1]

Brian Aldiss writes of a British Science Fiction Association invitation to Kingsley Amis:
    ...In 1961, as President of the BSFA, I wrote to the author of Lucky Jim (as I then thought of him) and invited him to come to our Easter Convention as Guest of Honour.  He came.
    That was at Gloucester...  Also present... a ball of American fire then living in Denmark called Harry Harrison.  The convention was a roaring success.  None of us stopped talking or drinking...          [TSOFT p134] 

[Philip K Dick recounts:]  "...in 1963, as I walked alone day after day along that country road with no one to talk to, no one to be with, that metal, blind, inhuman visage appeared to me again, but now transcendent and vast, and absolutely evil."
    The visage - which became Palmer Eldritch - was a psychic implosion on the order of Phil's classroom horrors.  The difference was that now, as a writer, Phil possessed a means of response...                  [DIALOPKDp127]

22nd April 1964, New York City: first face-to-face meeting between Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick; they discussed ideas for a film that would become 2001. 

Patrick Moore, the new director of Armagh Planetarium, went to join the local cricket club; the result is recounted by Moore in his 2003 autobiography 80 Not Out.
    ...I met the Secretary, who asked me several questions:
    "Are you a bat, a bowler or an all-rounder?"
    "Purely a bowler; leg-spin, medium pace.  No. 11 bat."
    "Good; we need a spinner.  Are you Protestant or Catholic?"
    I looked at him in amazement.  "What on earth does that matter?"
    "Of course it matters here.  It makes a lot of difference."
    I rose to my feet.  "I'm a Druid.  Good afternoon." - and I never went near the Pavilion again...                  

Arthur C Clarke appeared as a commentator for the CBS News broadcast of the Apollo 11 Moon landing on 20th July 1969. He provided special analysis alongside the main anchor, Walter Cronkite, and former astronaut Walter Schirra.

---

Brian Aldiss, The Shape of Further Things (1970) [=TSOFT]; L Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) [=LAB]; John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1949) [=ALOSACD]; Lovat Dickson, H.G.Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (1969) [=LDHGW]; Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C S Lewis: A Biography (1974)[RLGWH]; John L Ingham, Into Your Tent: the world of Eric Frank Russell (2010) [=IYT]; Leslie S Klinger, The New Annotated H P Lovecraft (2014) [=TNAHPL]; C S Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1935) [=SBJ]; Simon Mitton, Fred Hoyle: A Life in Science (2005) [=FHALIS]; John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming (1966) [=TLOIF]; Irwin Porges, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (1975) [=ERBIP]; E Hoffman Price, "Clark Ashton Smith: A Memoir" [=CASAM] (published as a preface to the Smith collection Tales of Science and Sorcery,1964); Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K Dick (2005) [=DIALOPKD].

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