Sublime

It was then under the editorship of Raymond A. Palmer, a four-foot-tall hunchback with a most lively and unorthodox mind. In later years, he created, virtually single-handed, the flying saucer craze and he took to publishing magazines on pseudoscience. He died in 1977 at the age of sixty-seven. I never met him in person, but he was the first editor

The most colorful character I ever met at science fiction conventions in the 1950s was Harlan Ellison, who was barely out of his teens at the time. He claims he is five feet four inches tall, but it doesn’t really matter. In talent, energy, and courage he is eight feet tall. He was born in 1934 and had a miserable youth. Being always small and

“Top of the page: the title. Title.” Mr. Dickens mused, head down, rubbing his chin whiskers. “Pip, what’s a rare fine title for a novel that happens half in London, half in Paris?” “A—” I ventured. “Yes?” “A Tale,” I went on. “Yes?!” “A Tale of . . . Two Cities?!” “Madame!” Grandma looked up as he spoke. “This boy is a genius!”

One of the branches of pulp fiction was “science fiction”—the smallest and least regarded branch. It came into being in the pulp world in the form of Amazing Stories, whose first issue appeared in April 1926. Its editor and, therefore, the founding father of magazine science fiction, Hugo Gernsback, called it “scientifiction,” an ugly portmanteau