For me, the whole New Era/L. Ron Hubbard/Writers of the Future saga began a long, long time ago, in a country far, far away...
I was in Australia, high on the excitement of being at my first Worldcon, and full of the excitement of bidding for our Worldcon. The parties we gave each night of the convention were fun but exhausting (they ran till 4am) and we were all still a little jetlagged from the journey. One of the main committee jobs there (apart from serving on the site selection desk, seeing how the convention was run, getting to know people and organizing the best parties in Melbourne) was checking out the other parties. With Malcolm as chair we were all able to get into the closed parties. And the best of them was the New Era permanent party.
1 admit that I was both naive and ignorant. I had never before heard of either New Era or L. Ron Hubbard, but then Hubbard's is not the type of SF that I read. Fred Harris seemed a nice guy – who doesn't when they're hosting a party with lots of free food and drink?
My next encounter with the whole tribe was in Atlanta. By this time I had heard of Scientology and Dianetics, but it all seemed a very long way from SF. Especially when, true to form, the New Era parties were about the best at the convention. Then, suddenly, one night, the New Era party became the Bridge party, but it really made no difference – there was more champagne than there had been before, and the buffet was a little better, but the same people were there and it was all good fun.
This was where I first met Algis Budrys. I had lunch with him and Fred Harris to talk about a British version of Writers of the Future. It didn't seem at all untoward at the time – everyone was taken out to lunch quite a lot, and Fred seemed very friendly. He even remembered my name and a fair bit about me; I was really impressed by his brilliant memory. I'd also spent some time talking to finalists in the Writers of the Future contest, and they seemed OK. So I was very receptive to the idea of a British version of the contest – or, at least, a British version of the Writers of the Future Workshop.
I was asked to suggest a venue for this workshop, and eventually I came up with the idea of the Dickens House Museum, a charity which I knew could do with any extra money. The Americans loved the idea of a writers' workshop taking place in the olde worlde charm of the very house where Dickens once lived and wrote. I arranged everything for them – went along and offered money to the curator, who was delighted, and liaised with Fred in America. For all of this, which took a fair bit of time, I was (mea culpa) offered "something wonderful" by Fred. This turned out to be £200, for which I was very grateful (and half of which was stolen from me at the con. The wages of sin...?). I've been asking myself since if this is the source of the rumour that all the Conspiracy committee were paid large amounts of money by New Era.
At the same time as I was in contact with Fred about the workshop, Ian Sorensen was trying to get sponsorship for the convention. In case anyone out there wonders why we needed this, just remind yourself that there were more programmed hours at the Worldcon than there were at the Edinburgh Festival. And all of this costs money – not to pay people to do things, but to hire the sound systems, the tech/ops equipment, the staging, the lighting, and so on. All of these "unseen" unglamorous expensive pieces of equipment are what make the convention audible and visible to the attendees. Then there's the cost of printing and mailing out the Progress Reports and the Programme Book and the Pocket Programme, and then there's the cost of the guests of honour and of the programme itself, the fireworks, the films, and so on. There will be a published breakdown of the costs of it all as soon as we have them. At the moment we still don't know if we've broken even, though we do hope so. One thing is, however, clear: Without any sponsorship at all, we would definitely have made a loss.
Big conventions are necessarily expensive, and I don't think we were extravagant in what we did. Before we approached any American publishers for sponsorship, we tried all the British ones. They were quite willing to give us books for prizes, or books for auction, but, despite several initial shows of interest and even the odd promise or two, not one of the British publishers sponsored us. They have meagre promotional budgets, and they spent what little they had in hosting the traditional Worldcon parties.
And then Fred Harris offered us sponsorship. The details were a little complex, but in the end New Era paid us £3350 in cash (all of which went into the convention) and in addition paid the printer for the colour cover of the Pocket Programme so that the total sum was about £5000. As I said above, without this money we would probably either have had to declare ourselves bankrupt or cut out several events – perhaps the running of all the Hugo nominated films, perhaps the fireworks, who knows? At the time, the money seemed a lifesaver: it enabled us to carry on and do what we had planned to do. We accepted it gratefully. Then the problems began.
About two weeks before the convention, Rob Jackson, in charge of Publications, phoned Paul [Oldroyd] to say that New Era would be sending the artwork for the Pocket Programme cover straight to the printers. Rob said he hadn't seen the artwork, but that it was the first Frank Frazetta cover in years, the cover used on the new Writers of the Future anthology. Knowing my views on semi-naked women on SF covers, Paul had me speak to Rob, and I said that I felt the whole committee should have a chance to agree on this cover. After a lot of phone calls, we all agreed that we did not want on the cover of the Pocket Programme a piece of artwork which we considered both sexist and degrading. It would have been contrary to the spirit of the convention, we felt, and to the way in which we had approached artwork and programming.
After a lot of discussions with New Era, during which they seriously considered removing their sponsorship, we stuck to our guns. Eventually we were offered another cover which was not sexist. Once again, no one on the committee actually saw the cover before it went to print, though Robert Springall did tell Rob Jackson that it was the cover of L. Ron Hubbard's The Invaders Plan, the first novel in the "Mission Earth" dekalogy.
Well, you've seen it. It certainly wasn't sexist – merely violent and oppressive, and I personally regret its choice. But there was so little time – something like two days was the maximum time we had to decide on our position and have New Era come up with more camera-ready screened artwork. Somehow, erroneously now I think, it seemed a better alternative.
Budrys was in the country by this time, and he invited Paul and me to dinner, along with Steve Jones, Ian Watson, Neil Gaiman and a host of others. I was paid my £200 and delightedly spent some of it on a bottle of perfume and a bottle of scotch. And then ... off to Brighton.
Apparently the workshop had gone well, and I was pleased that my choice of venue had proved acceptable. Now Budrys was talking about holding another one. The first had been arranged in a rush, he said, and he wanted to get a new workshop leader with a feel for Britain. And then there was the question of a British judge for the Writers of the Future contest. This all seemed positive at the time, and in a sense still does. Budrys wanted to make an announcement about these two things during the convention, and he asked for a few moments before the Hugo ceremony to do this. We (the committee in our daily meeting) were a little wary since it didn't seem to us to be the best time to make such an announcement. So we offered the alternative of the Masquerade, where Budrys was to be one of the judges and New Era were sponsoring one of the categories. But this wasn't felt to be the correct venue for the announcement. What was needed, we were told, was an event which would draw all the people interested in SF and not just those who were interested in costume.
We debated this and decided it wasn't an unreasonable request. Peter Nicholls, the MC for the Hugo ceremony, said that he was uncomfortable with the idea since it might appear to suggest that New Era was in some way connected with the Hugos – it may in fact look a little like an advertisement for New Era. To avoid this impression, two things were done. Firstly, Mike Christie, one of my two deputies at the convention (Peter himself being the other), volunteered to speak to Budrys and find out exactly what he wanted to say. Secondly, the committee decided that we could come up with one or two other announcements before the Hugos in addition to Budrys's so that it would look like there were a number of items of information to be imparted to a large audience.
In the event, both Mike and I spoke to Budrys about his announcement. He said to each of us that his specific role was to dissociate Writers of the Future from the Church of Scientology and from the rest of the Hubbard empire. He also said that he wouldn't mention anything about the rest of Hubbard's publishing business or about Scientology, except to say that he and Writers of the Future were totally separate from them. He was so convincing that I recall saying how pleased I was to hear it, as I was concerned that a writer and reviewer of his stature should be connected with something that others had told me was shabby. He again reiterated that he and Writers of the Future had no connection with New Era or Bridge Publications except for the fact that they published the Writers of the Future anthologies.
When Mike and I reported this back to Peter, he was quite happy to have Budrys make the announcement and for us not to put in any of our spurious notices in addition. Given this background, you can imagine my surprise and horror when Budrys went up on stage and stated that he had been asked by the committee to make the announcement. This is not true: we were approached by him, and only after long, debate did we agree.
After that came the post-Hugo party. Yes, we knew it was happening. The whole committee had been invited, but there never had been any suggestion that this was an "Official" party – it was merely one of the many publishers' parties held at the convention. Again, I was naively astonished to find that the Hugo winners had been reluctantly drawn there and photographed. We had arranged for photos to be taken in the arena, a nice neutral area. We had not been informed that New Era would take more pictures at their party, though, looking back, perhaps we should have expected it.
So, after the party, what do I think about it all? I suppose I feel that we were naive. But at no stage did we realize that we would get no other sponsorship at all, and so it wasn't apparent until the convention itself that New Era would stand out as much as they did. Perhaps if we had increased the cost of an attending membership we might have been able to do without any sponsorship at all, but that seemed no answer to the financial problems we were having. I can't see any easy solution to the dilemma. In one way, though, I'm glad we did what we did. It can act as a warning to others, who will not be as foolish or naively trusting as we were.
(This article is based on my personal recollections, and does not necessarily express the views of the Conspiracy '87 Committee as a whole.)