Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies

by Theodore R. Cogswell, Algis Budrys (Introduction)

[ This is a replica edition ebook--basically a PDF. We are completing a "real" ebook edition, and releasing this in the interim. You see the print page images to read, but note it still has typos in the invisible text used if you search. See the note on the first page for more details.] PITFCS - Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies

Before SFWA there was PITFCS—

In 1959 the late Ted Cogswell started a "fanzine for pros" with the mock-pompous title Publications of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies, soon to be known as PITFCS. Its circulation was limited to science fiction writers and editors, and its contents were mostly their letters discussing their own and each other's work. PITFCS quickly became the place where s-f professionals talked to each other about the problems of the field, both literary and economic.

The discussions were frank, discerning, insightful, humorous, occasionally a little insulting, and even a bit bawdy. PITFCS was where the pros could let their hair down. It lasted only a few years—Cogswell had to give it up in order to write his doctoral dissertation. Then the Science Fiction Writers of America was organized, and SFWA's publications began filling the niche that PITFCS had occupied. PITFCS was short-lived, but has been remembered with joy all these years, and Advent is proud to reprint it now.

(How is the acronym PITFCS pronounced? Don't ask. But if you insist, Tony Boucher tells you in a limerick.)

This volume reprints PITFCS from first issue to last, and adds an index which is perhaps more comprehensive than it needs to be. However, we have omitted most of the typos for which Ted Cogswell was famous. (His motto was "PITFCS are never proofread.")

Here are letters and essays from such science fiction notables as Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Algis Budrys, John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Avram Davidson, Gordon Dickson, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Fritz Leiber, Frederik Pohl, Eric Frank Russell, Kurt Vonnegut, and Don Wollheim.

Amazing and astounding to note, this is not a period piece with only historical interest. Most of the problems discussed in PITFCS are still living issues today. It seems the tensions between writers, editors, and publishers don't change.

For example, here are several excerpts from a running debate about what an author owes to his art, and how much editors should be privileged to change an author's



- "Once [an editor] added a paragraph to a story of mine that changed my whole climax, but he had bought the story and it was his to do what he liked with to make it more acceptable to his readers."

- [edited for space] The debate never reached any conclusion, of course, and it is still going on today—and not only in science fiction. (What, you want to know which writers produced these nuggets? Buy the book and read it!) Other goodies to be found in this volume include Gordie Dickson's analysis of A. J. Budrys' Rogue Moon, several conflicting critiques of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers, and Norman DeWitt's essay "Is Science Fiction Literature?" There are also limericks and other verses (some of them clean), and the photographic explanation of why Isaac Asi

Kindle Edition

Published September 26, 2020

About the author

Theodore Rose Cogswell was an American science fiction author.