My quarter as a student teacher was financially challenging. It was also one of the most memorable periods of our lives.
Just as I was preparing to quit my job and start my student teaching under the guidance of Mrs. Fincher at West Rome High School (yes, I ended up student teaching at the same school from which I had graduated less than four years earlier), Susan and I decided that this would be the perfect time to launch our own fanzine.
Future Retrospective. A review fanzine focusing primarily on SF & fantasy, but also touching on comics, fanzines, television, music, and more.
Susan and I had done apazines for years (small-circulation fanzines for amateur press alliances, which are shared with the other members of the apa in exchange for copies of their apazines), and we had written for other fanzines as well as for prolines like Jim Steranko's Mediascene. But FR was our first fanzine for mass (if 200 readers qualifies as "mass") distribution.
When you launch a new fanzine, you're throwing your work (and your money) into the void, hoping you get enough support, response, and (ideally) subscriptions to keep things going. So even with our tight budget, we launched Future Retrospective, printing it and mailing at out at our cost.
Apparently a lot of the people to who we sent the first issue liked it. Within a month, we had sufficient subscription support to cover the cost of the first issue and next few--and even better, we had overwhelmingly positive support from kind members of the professional writing community. Piers Anthony, Michael Bishop, Thomas Burnett Swann, Joe Green, Andre Norton--they all sent in letters in response to the first issue. And having material from them in the second issue (where we published those letters of comment) generated even more subscription and letter support.
We followed the same model that a fan named Dick Geis had used in his fanzine The Alien Critic, mixing reviews and letters of comment rather than having a selection of letters at the end of the fanzine. It sometimes resulted in odd juxtapositions--a letter of comment from Piers Anthony appearing just before a review of a new Piers Anthony novel--but I think the format was a part of FR's success. People enjoyed seeing commentary from acclaimed professional writers alongside reviews, and the mixture made readers more likely to read everything in the issue.
We got interesting commentary from Thomas Burnett Swann, an erudite, scholarly, and refined writer of mythologically-influenced fantasy who revealed that he was also a longtime Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, and that if he had his way Jeff Jones would do the covers for every one of his books. We got a letter from Andre Norton revealing that, while she never planned to write another Time Agents novel, she actually had plans for the cast that could have filled multiple volumes. Or both Piers Anthony and Thomas Burnett Swann agreeing with Susan that most female protagonists in science fiction were unrealistic portrayals of women. Or Piers revealing that, while he had written a disaster novel called Rings of Ice that was set in part in North Georgia (and he even ran parts of that novel past Susan and me to make sure he got the setting right), he actually didn't even like disaster novels. We would even cross paths with veteran Weird Tales greats like Frank Belknap Long, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and E. Hoffman Price, which was a dream come true for an Arkham collector like me.
This was early 1975. There was no internet, no social media. Fanzines were the only way most fans ever interacted with the authors whose work they enjoyed. So these letters, filled with insights and revelations into the authors attitudes and ideas and motivations, were the sort of thing that fanzine readers loved. As did Susan and I.
Future Retrospective would run 17 issues, wrapping up in 1979. Susan and I loved doing it, but our lives kept expanding to fill every available moment, and eventually our time as SF reviewers came to an end. But for the four and a half years that we did the fanzine, we sold lots of copies (the print run on the final issue was 650 copies), and we even won a Rebel Award for outstanding fan achievement in Southern SF fandom--and Future Retrospective was cited in the award presentation.
What I loved most, though, were the lifelong friendships that came out of it. We were invited to visit some of these authors at their homes. We became close friends with fan artists and writers who eagerly contributed to our fanzine.
And one of those friendships, which lasted for many years, was with Piers Anthony Jacob, who wrote under the name Piers Anthony. Our correspondence led to Piers inviting us to visit him at his home in Tampa--and it culminated in an offer so generous that I still find it hard to believe.
Piers, Susan and I often discussed the contents of SF magazines, and how many of SF's biggest names no longer contributed to the magazines the way they did in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Piers mentioned how much he loved SF magazines when he was a fan and a beginning writer, adding that he had thousands of magazines going back to the 1940s.
Then he asked if we wanted them.
Of course we wanted them! This was an incredible library of magazines including Astounding/Analog, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, If, Amazing, Fantastic, and many more--and Piers was willing to give them to us!
There were two requirements. First, we would have to drive down to his house to pick them up. Secondly, we had to promise that we would never sell them--if we lost interest in SF magazines, we would have to find an eager recipient to whom we would pass them on.
Our two cars were Volkswagens, neither of which could hold even a fraction of the magazines he was offering. My parents, however, had a Ford LTD that was one of those land yachts that had plenty of space. They were willing to let us borrow their car for the trip.
Arranging the time off turned out to be far less tricky than I thought it would be. Piers wanted them to go away fairly quickly, so he asked if we could pick them up in March or April of 1975. Thankfully, I had two days off from student teaching in early April, so we headed off to Florida.
Piers and Cam (his wife) were incredibly kind hosts, spending an afternoon swapping stories and filing us in about the early days of his writing career. His daughters Penny and Cheryl were kind enough to pick blackberries for all of to snack on while we were chatting. After a while, Piers said, "These are the largest blackberries I've ever seen. Where did you find them?" To which his daughters replied, "They grow really big over at the cemetery!" We looked at each other for a moment, then looked warily at the blackberries--but we figured we had eaten most of them by that point, so with a "why not?" grin, Piers ate the next to the last blackberry and offered the final one to me.
As for the magazines--the collection was even larger than I anticipated. And best of all, many of the magazines had carbon copy pages in them. I asked Piers what they were, and he explained that he and a group of writers who began at about the same time--a group that included Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, and others--would sometimes send one another carbons of the original manuscripts of their stories so that each of them could see how the editors had changed the stories for publication. So not only did I have an incredible collection of SF magazines, but I also had copies of unaltered manuscripts of numerous short stories!
We packed box after box into the LTD, filling the trunk, the back seats, the back floorboard, and even the floor and front bench seat between Susan and me, leaving barely enough room for us to sit for the trip back. I don't think that LTD got much better than 10 miles per gallon on the drive back, since it was filled with about a half a ton of SF magazines.
We got years of reading enjoyment out of those magazines. By the early 2000s, when my interest in science fiction had waned, we decided it was time for the collection to find a new home with someone else who would enjoy it as much as we had. Between 2005 and 2008, we found fans eager to enjoy those magazines, and fulfilled our promise to Piers. And we never took a dime for them, just as he wouldn't take a dime from us when he gave them to us in April 1975.
And none of this would have happened had we not taken a chance with our very own review fanzine called Future Retrospective.
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