A History of the Science Fiction Writer’s Association #SciFiSunday
How do you build community? When science fiction came to prominence in the pulps, fans formed clubs so they could share their love of science fiction, politics, and visions of the future. But what about the writers? It wasn’t until the 60’s, at the start of the New Wave, that legendary writer and editor Damon Knight thought it was time that science fiction writers had a club of their own. Here’s more from the Science Fiction Writers of America:
[Founding SFWA and legendary writer/editor Knight recalled], “To begin with, in the late 50s, I think it was, there was an effort in New York to establish a science fiction writers’ organization—Jim Blish was one of the people behind it, and they held a series of great big meetings and thoroughly discussed the matter, adopted a set of by-laws and elected officers, and then the officers went home, and that was the end of that. The same thing happened in Los Angeles when a similar attempt was made there. I attended one of those meetings in New York, and I was terribly frustrated because I saw they were doing it the wrong way, but I couldn’t do anything about it because, at that time, I was a rather small writer. But I said to myself that if I ever got to be a bigger writer, I would do something about it.”
In the third issue of the Bulletin, James Blish has a slightly different account: “…Fred Pohl, Lester del Rey, and I tried to get a ‘professional’s Hugo’ going; it died primarily because Fred suddenly became editor-in-fact of Galaxy and no longer felt it proper to be associated with such a project, and Les—who was quite ill at the time—and I couldn’t carry it alone.” The first attempt on the West Coast was named the Science Fantasy Writers of America and did have a number of meetings through the early fifties but ultimately evaporated. In the mid-sixties, A. E. van Vogt tried to create a “SFWPA,” but it was abandoned when SFWA began to take off.
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