Complete Fiction of Fox B. Holden by Fox B. Holden (ed. Jerry eBooks, 2020)
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 3.5 MB
Overview: BREATHES there a newsman with soul so dead who never plugged up the holes in his head and muttered “damme, I wish somebody would interview me for once”? And, having so wished and gotten no place, toyed idly with the idea of doing the job himself someday . . .
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Anyhow, this one’s got the chance to give it a whirl in 500 words, and so, excelsior—
Holden: (interviewing) Well go ahead and talk!
Holden: (leaning back, contemplating) I suppose there are a few things that can be printed. I was one of a family of one boy, born in Rochester, N.Y. in 1923 B.S.—that’s Before Sisters—of whom there were a couple some 12 and 15 years later. There still are, and my life hasn’t been the same since. There, print that.
H: (interviewing) You’ve got 380 words to go and I don’t think we can use that about sisters.
H: (solemnly) Better keep it tame, at that. At the peculiar age of 12, in a Poughkeepsie, N.Y. grammar school, I got interested in aeronautics, Willy Ley, science-fiction, and money. Some time later, at Poughkeepsie High School, my interests broadened perceptibly. They now included aeronautics, Willy Ley, science-fiction, and money.
H: (still interviewing) No girls?
H: (thinking) I had heard the word; came across it once at Middlebury College, in Vermont. That’s where I went to study aeronautical engineering. I did, too—for about six months. But someplace there was a slip between the slide-stick and the psyche—by now I had read so much science-fiction that I wanted to write some myself. Switched to liberal arts, learned the alphabet, and viola, siehst-du?
H: (already losing interest) And that’s where you learned to write things.
H: (more seriously for a moment) I might never have really begun, or kept trying, if it hadn’t been for a fine professional in Middlebury who, for some reason, liked me. What I know, and where I’ve gotten so far, I owe largely to him. His name is Murray Hoyt.
H: (still interviewing) Keep going. 196 words left.
H: (getting warmed up now that it’s almost over) Army. Air Corps first as a cadet, but things didn’t quite work out. Infantry. Then ASTP, and Signal Corps. Wound up at Fort Knox as a tanked shave-tail (commanded a tank, you know) with a minor adventure here and there, and finally made it home—quite unheroically, not from overseas—and after getting the B.A. I’d started out for six years before, got my first newspaper job. General reporter, feature-writer, part-time desk-man, and you-name-it. Left there after a couple of years, and am now in West Haven, Conn., an assistant telegraph editor on the New Haven Register. And—oh yes. I got married. Two years ago, to a terrific art teacher.
H: (still interviewing) And does she—
H: (still talking) Reads science-fiction. Paints, too, of course, but reads science-fiction. Listens to sci—
H: (tiring) And now for your future?
H: (not tiring a bit) Oh, I have a very diversified field of interests. Aeronautics, Willy Ley, science-fiction, and money. Which, by the way, reminds me of the time I—
H: (sick of the whole thing) Learned, I’m sure, what “thirty” meant!
—Fox B. Holden
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