Skylab’s Rise and Fall

Skylab 1 patch designed by Kelly Freas.

Skylab 1 patch designed by Kelly Freas.

NASA will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launch of Skylab, America’s first space station, on May 14. 

Skylab hosted a trio of three-man crews — Kelly Freas designed the patch worn by the first, launched in May 1973. Once the third crew was ferried home in 1974, Skylab was abandoned.

Hopes that the forthcoming space shuttle would allow the facility to be reactivated were dashed because in there was no way to boost it into a higher orbit and keep it in space until the shuttle program got going.

Ironically, Skylab’s demise seems better remembered than any work that was ever done aboard.

Broadcast reports about its deteriorating orbit predicted likely places it might crash to Earth, representing another unrealized dream, and one more manmade problem for 1970s America to worry about — and therefore deserving of a certain bitter humor.  

Welcome home skylab

In the state of Washington a “Skylab Self-Defense Society” designated Spokane as the “Official U.S. Government Skylab Target.” The society painted a huge red-and-white bull’s-eye target behind its tiny rented office, and sold bull’s-eye T-shirts.

And a fan started his own “Save My Ass!” campaign, publishing flyers that asked people to donate so he could move out of Canada where the giant junk was predicted to hit.

Skylab ultimately re-entered the atmosphere above the southern Indian Ocean in 1979, with pieces landing inland along the south coast of Western Australia.

Several large pieces of Skylab survived, scattered in the Australian outback. Among the largest pieces were the oxygen tanks. One is featured to this day in a tiny museum along the waterfront in Esperance, a port town 450 miles from Perth. Another of the oxygen tanks was sent to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville and is on display there.

 [Thanks to Chronicles of the Dawn Patrol.]

He Was the Dean

Promotional copy for the new Murray Leinster biography says he was known as “The Dean of Science Fiction.”

I should not have been surprised: I read this in Sam Moskowitz’ Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction way back in the Seventies. However, I’d managed to forget it since. Or possibly repressed it, because as a young fan my fannish loyalties were to that rival claimant of the title: Robert A. Heinlein.

Heinlein acquired the title “Dean of Science Fiction” sometime around 1960, says J. Daniel Gifford in Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion.

How? Thomas Clareson suggests in his essay for Voices for the Future (1976) that whoever wrote the jacket copy on his books was responsible:

Today Heinlein is known to many, thanks to paperback advertising techniques at least, as the “Dean” of science fiction writers, not so much because of his length of service as because of his relationship to the corporate body of science fiction.

Certainly a book cover was the first place I saw Heinlein called “Dean.” On the other hand, Leinster was called “Dean” in 1949 by no less an authority than Time Magazine

In the U.S., Will F. Jenkins, a 27-year veteran, who also writes under the pen name of Murray Leinster, is regarded as the dean of writers in the field.

Leinster was rather humble about the whole thing. In his introduction to Great Stories of Science Fiction (1951) he explained that he was sometimes called “’Dean’ of science fiction writers by virtue of my having outlived a number of better men. This wholly accidental distinction is perhaps the reason I was given the opportunity to compile this book.”

And as Leinster makes clear, the term “Dean” was primarily associated with seniority, length of service in the sf field. Lester Del Rey in The World of Science Fiction, a survey of the genre published in 1980, echoed the choice of Leinster:

…Murray Leinster, whose work remained popular in science fiction for more than fifty years and who was rightly named “the Dean of science fiction writers.”

I don’t know whether Heinlein liked being called “Dean” or thought it mattered at all. Maybe Bill Patterson can answer this in a later volume of his Heinlein bio. From a fan’s viewpoint I thought the name suited RAH because so many of his stories involved mentoring, the acquiring of self-discipline, or were delivered in the voice of a respected elder who has things to say about life, like Lazarus Long.

After Leinster died in 1975 some of the writers who acknowledged him as the “Dean” thought the title deserved to be perpetuated, which meant picking a successor. Isaac Asimov made it clear he preferred length of service as the criterion for naming someone the “Dean.” In his 1979 essay for IASFM “The Dean of Science Fiction,” Heinlein was not a finalist. Asimov listed Jack Williamson, Clifford D. Simak, L. Sprague de Camp and Lester Del Rey. And just a few years later – even while all four were still alive – Asimov seemed to have narrowed his list to two, saying in The Hugo Winners: 1980-1982 (1986) “the only writer who can possibly compete with [Clifford D. Simak] as ‘dean of science fiction’ is Jack Williamson, who is four years younger than Cliff but has been publishing three years longer.”

Both Simak and Heinlein died in 1988. Del Rey died in 1993. De Camp died in 2000.

Williamson seems to have been the writer most people felt comfortable calling the “Dean” in later years. Several of his peers labeled him by some version of the title both before and after Heinlein died. Interestingly, when Algis Budrys dubbed Williamson the “Dean of Science Fiction” in a 1985 essay for The Science Fiction Yearbook the usage even passed muster with the volume’s editor, Jerry Pournelle, a good friend of Heinlein’s. Williamson lived on until 2006, continuing to produce, his last novel The Stonehenge Gate published just the year before he died.

Some others regarded Arthur C. Clarke as the true heir to the title. Gerald K. O’Neill in The High Frontier (1989) called Clarke the dean of science fiction, and so did a contributor to a 1989 volume of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Clarke passed away in 2008.

People outside the field have always bandied the title about – Ray Bradbury was called the Dean on a TV show in the Sixties. Now he practically qualifies, though not quite – I imagine Fred Pohl has the edge in years as a professional writer.

Other specialties in the science fiction field have their “Deans.” Google tells me Frank Kelly Freas was called the “dean of science fiction artists,” though I must say I managed to go my entire time in fandom up to today without ever hearing him called that.

The New York Times once referred to Donald Wollheim as the “Dean” of science fiction editors, according to a 1981 article in The Bloomsbury Review.  Campbell had been so-called at least as early as 1947 — in Samuel Stephenson Smith’s How to Double Your Vocabulary, of all places — but he’d been dead almost ten years before The Bloomsbury Review took up the subject.

And let’s not forget that in Ann Arbor in 1975, Dean McLaughlin, author of “Hawk Among the Sparrows,” was who trufans called “Dean of Science Fiction.”

Of course, many will have become aware that no woman author’s name has been mentioned at any point, even in touching on the most recent decade. Ursula K. LeGuin regularly offers wisdom about topical issues in the field, and until death ended her long career Andre Norton was respected and influential, so there are women who might have been nominated to the role. However, I suspect the whole notion of a “Dean of Science Fiction,” which was never more than of anecdotal significance, is fading from fannish awareness too rapidly for a real sense of injustice to take hold.

[Thanks to John Lorentz, Google Ngram and Steven H Silver’s SF Site for help with this story.]

Lost: My Mind

Kaja and Phil Foglio

Phil Foglio is a Loscon 37 Guest of Honor. Now famed for his Girl Genius online comic, he came to early prominence as the artist who partnered with Robert Asprin in 1976 to create “The Capture”, a very funny graphic story presented at cons in slide show form that became the first faannish production ever nominated for the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo.  

Even though it’s Phil’s pro work that Loscon is focusing on, this was the reason I remembered “The Capture” today. Or tried to.

I don’t know if I’ve seen it again since 1976 when I sat in a darkened ballroom at MidAmeriCon while the images flashed by and Robert Asprin narrated. Or so I almost remember.

And that afternoon the hilarity and excitement built as the audience repeatedly and ever more loudly filled in the comic line that drives the story, which is….  Which is…

I thought I was losing my mind. How could I remember sitting in that ballroom and not remember the joke?

I thought — Man, I’m embarrassing myself here. What if fans found out this happened to me?

Just thank goodness that we have the internet. I knew Google would save me because it can always find the answer even when my question is wrong.

Except not today.

You know the joke about trying to look something up in the dictionary that you don’t know how to spell? It’s like that. If you misremember the catchphrase as being “no such thing as ____” there isn’t a search engine in the world that can help you.

Originally I expected Google or Bing to return the answer if I merely searched Foglio and “The Capture”, but that was too general for them to work with. That search returned a lot of websites that know a coloring book was made from the show art, or that Robert Asprin shared credit, but provide very little detail about “The Capture” itself, not even the iconic tagline. Nor is there a Wikipedia article about “The Capture”, only a reference to it on a disambiguation page, and another in the article about Foglio himself, “The Capture” formatted as one of those pathetic red-colored links Wikipedia uses when it wishes somebody would write an article about the thing, except nobody does because they’re annoyed that the last entry they did had 17 warning labels slapped on it by the Wiki guardians for bad formatting, lack of citations and halitosis.     

So I recommend that if you ever find yourself in a situation where Google and Bing have failed – and with the onset of increasing age who won’t? – you should do what I did.

Ask Craig Miller.

He’ll know.

Once Craig reminded me about gremlins I could get any search engine to fill in the rest, just like a bank that’s always ready to lend money to people who don’t need it. “Gremlins do not exist!” is everywhere on the internet. Armed with the correct catchphrase it is no trouble at all to find thousands of references, including the concise description I will use as a closing quote, written by Jerry Pournelle as part of a reminiscence about the late Kelly Freas:  

Kelly was the “star” of a famous science fiction skit called “The Capture”, based on the premise that a World Science Fiction Convention was held on a cruise ship in the Bermuda Triangle, and the inevitable happened: all the passengers were taken aboard an alien spaceship. The skit was done as a series of reports by the alien expedition commander. Most of the reports received advice from headquarters that “Gremlins do not exist,” although it was clear from what was going on with the detainees that perhaps there was a gremlin among them. It would be no favor to Robert Asprin and Phil Foglio who created this remarkable presentation to try to summarize it, and I don’t suppose it was recorded, which is all our loss.

Symphony Plays Queen for a Day

The Virginia Symphony Orchestra will be performing music by Queen in Norfolk on May 28, giving a writer for The Virginian-Pilot all the excuse necessary to reminisce about the time a local artist created an album cover for the supergroup. And who was that artist? You know him well:

Queen’s music has long merged disparate elements. Three decades ago, they sought the artwork of a middle-aged Virginia Beach resident who, up until then, had claimed no kinship to rock. He was Frank Kelly Freas, the legendary science fiction artist who was famous for everything from his work in MAD Magazine to NASA uniforms. Freas won an unprecedented 11 Hugo Awards – the science-fiction world’s equivalent to the Oscar.

His collaboration with Queen began in 1977 when Roger Taylor, the band’s drummer, saw Freas’ work on the cover of a 1953 science fiction magazine. Taylor went wild over a drawing of a robot holding battered people in the palm of its hand.

Queen searched the world for the artist and found Freas at his secluded, cluttered ranch house just south of the Pocaty Creek bridge in Virginia Beach, where he lived for 25 years. It had long been the center of the science-fiction art universe.

[Via Laura Brodian Freas.]

Hugos in Jeopardy!

Deb Geisler reports that October 16’s episode of Jeopardy! featured a category called “Complete the Hugo Award Winning Title.” As everyone knows, this quiz show reveals a clue — an answer — and makes contestants supply the appropriate question. Deb says the contestants only got two of the questions right.

Hugo Award winners have occasionally been showing up as Jeopardy! answers for years. A quick Google search returns these examples.

A clue in the show aired October 31, 2006 was: “Isaac Asimov won a 1977 Hugo Award for this novelette about a robot named Andrew who lives to be 200 years old.” The right question was: “The Bicentennial Man.”

In the episode aired October 25, 2005, a clue in the “Classic Television” category was: “This is the first Television show to receive the Hugo Award for Dramatic Presentation.” The appropriate question was: What is the Twilight Zone?

On November 7, 2000 contestants were given this answer: “10-time Hugo Award winner Kelly Freas is famous for illustrating the magazine called ‘Astounding’ in this genre.” The question: “Science fiction.”

The earliest example I found appears in the online bio of Harlan Ellison:

On 22 June 1998, Ellison’s career reached a dizzying summit when he became the answer to a clue in the Double Jeopardy round of that evening’s broadcast of the television game show, Jeopardy.

Don’t ask me why Ellison omits the mandatory exclamation point after Jeopardy!

Frank Kelly Freas (1922-2005)

Science fiction’s most beloved pro artist, the versatile Kelly Freas, passed in his sleep before dawn on January 2, 2005. The cause of death was not announced, but his health had been failing for some time. He will be buried in Chatsworth, CA. There will be a public memorial service in a week or two. (It may be hosted at the LASFS and, if so, the place is already decorated with a complete collection of his pro-space-exploration posters that also hang in the Smithsonian.)

Frank Kelly Freas was born in Hornell, NY in 1922. His first professional publication was the cover for Weird Tales, November 1950. His varied career included painting WWII bomber nose art, doing MAD Magazine covers from 1955-1962, designing the Skylab 1 crew patch, being the cover artist for a Queen album, and doing infinite covers and illustrations for sf prozines. He was President of ASFA, 1982-1983.

He also did caricatures of everyone from Alfred E. Newman to John John W. Campbell, and countless convention fans. A very fannish pro, Freas was a longtime Dorsai Irregular and a member of First Fandom. Having been one of the GoH’s at the 1982 Worldcon (Chicon IV), the Chicago in 2000 bid made him the subject of one its collectible trading cards. He was also a Torcon 3 guest of honor (2003) but was unable to attend due to injuries sustained in a fall a few weeks before the con.

His 10 Best Professional Artist Hugos set a record for most Hugos won for professional work that stood til 1991, when Whelan won his 11th. Freas won his last 5 Hugos consecutively, 1972-1976. He was nominated a total of 24 times. Also, in 2001 he also won a Retro Hugo for his work in 1950.

Freas was one of the most gentlemanly individuals in the sf community. He will be profoundly missed.