In his 18-room Hollywood Hills mansion-cum-museum, Forrest J. Ackerman, 80, has assembled a 300,000-piece archive of science fiction and horror artifacts, ranging from old pulp magazines to illustrations and props. It is partly from this collection that Ackerman - who has done everything from being a literary agent for Ed Wood to playing the US President in Amazon Women on the Moon - has compiled a collection of 65 "rediscovered" SF shorts, featuring big names like Bradbury and Asimov as well as less-known writers.
Ackermanthology!, being shipped this week, is just one of the projects on Ackerman's plate - a 4 CD-ROM tour of his mansion is set for release by Marlin Software next month, and a three-volume coffee table historical series tracing sci-fi, horror, and fantasy is slated for next year. Ackerman also has a Web site packed with stuff, called 4e's Foyer, and he writes a column for the Sci-Fi Channel published every three weeks.
Ackerman's original proposal for a collection of 50 short stories, made in the 1960s, was rejected by an editor who said that reading so many short stories in a row would shell-shock the reader. When Isaac Asimov came out with an anthology of 100 stories which proved popular, Ackerman played catch up, pitched a collection of 365 stories, and eventually settled on 65 with his current publisher, GPG.
The preservationist impulse drives the Ackermanthology! collection. Ackerman clearly mourns the passing of pulp's heyday. In a figure that puts the hyperbole of the zine revolution in perspective, Ackerman looks back to a time, in the '40s, when there were 49 pulp magazines of science and fantasy published in the United States. "Most people didn't think of them as something to keep," says Ackerman, with equal parts gloating and matter-of-fact bewilderment.
Ackerman's collection dates back to 1926, and as well as being the source of the book's material, is a source of pride. "I was considered the resident lunatic when I was in high school," Ackerman says. "Forrey Ackerman thought there was going to be something called atomic power or that we would go to moon, maybe by the year 2000. Science-fiction fans were considered nuts."
By contrast to those days of high-minded speculation, science fiction written these days isn't as exciting to Ackerman. "Science-fiction stories in the past were mainly written by scientists and experimenters who would extrapolate from whatever they were working on, thinking of how it would work 10, 20, 50 years into the future how it might turn out and affect mankind."
What those stories lacked in literary power they made up for by the strength of their ideas, says Ackerman. Although he admits to a lack of time to really dig into the new writers, these days Ackerman says he's "hard put" to find a story whose ideas excite him. Ackermanthology! looks back at those that did.
